Abstract
Maritime search and rescue (SAR) operations are critical for ensuring safety at sea. Islands have been considered as feasible solutions for the construction of new maritime SAR bases to improve the capacity of SAR operations in remote sea areas. This paper proposes a new framework, based on island spatial information, for determining the optimal locations for maritime SAR bases. The framework comprises four steps. First, candidate islands for the construction of maritime SAR bases are selected. Second, the potential rescue demand is estimated by employing ship location data and marine incident data. In the third step, the response time from candidate islands to any site at sea is calculated, with explicit consideration of the impact of sea conditions on the ship’s speed. Fourth, the final island locations are proposed by solving the maximal covering location problem (MCLP). The proposed framework was applied to the South China Sea. The results showed that there would be a decrease of 1.09 h in terms of the mean access time for the South China Sea if the six selected island bases were constructed, whilst the primary coverage increased from 62.63% to 80.02% when using a 6-hour threshold. This new framework is expected to contribute to improvements in safety at sea and should be applicable to any sea area where the construction of island rescue bases is being considered.
Highlights
Maritime transportation is associated with various types of risk, and many accidents occur at sea in navigational areas, such as collisions, groundings, sinkings, and fires [1]
There would be an estimated decrease of 1.09 h in the mean access time following the construction of six island rescue bases, whilst the primary coverage would increase from 62.63% to 80.02%
Maritime search and rescue (SAR) services remain fundamental to the safety of humans, property, and the marine environment
Summary
Maritime transportation is associated with various types of risk, and many accidents occur at sea in navigational areas, such as collisions, groundings, sinkings, and fires [1]. Akbari et al [23] applied a modular capacitated multi-objective model to optimize the location-allocation of maritime search and rescue vessels with regard to several criteria, including primary and backup coverage and mean access time. Akbari et al [7] presented two integer-linear optimization models with different objectives, namely, maximizing primary coverage and minimizing mean access time, to solve the maritime SAR location problem and applied the models to a case study in the Atlantic region of Canada. The problem of finding the optimal locations of islands for maritime SAR bases is solved by the maximal covering location problem (MCLP) model This new framework is applied to the South China Sea, which contains over 250 small islands, atolls, cays, shoals, reefs, and sandbars. Constraints (10) restricts yj to become one only if there is a base j that can reach cell i in time
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