No abstract is provided for this article.
The marine environment is vast, harsh, and challenging. Unanticipated faults and events might lead to loss of vessels, transported goods, collected scientific data, and business reputation. Hence, systems have to be in place that monitor the safety performance of operation and indicate if it drifts into an intolerable safety level. This article proposes a process for developing safety indicators for the operation of autonomous marine systems (AMS). The condition of safety barriers and resilience engineering form the basis for the development of safety indicators, synthesizing and further adjusting the dual assurance and the resilience based early warning indicator (REWI) approaches. The article locates the process for developing safety indicators in the system life cycle emphasizing a timely implementation of the safety indicators. The resulting safety indicators reflect safety in AMS operation and can assist in planning of operations, in daily operational decision-making, and identification of improvements. Operation of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) exemplifies the process for developing safety indicators and their implementation. The case study shows that the proposed process leads to a comprehensive set of safety indicators. It is expected that application of the resulting safety indicators consequently will contribute to safer operation of current and future AMS.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Decarbonization is a trend in the maritime industry and may include the use of alternative energy sources on ships. At the same time, autonomous ships are under development. In the future, the two technologies may be combined. The objective of this study is to identify possible hazards related to the operation of autonomous vessels using green energy sources. An extended and holistic Systems-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) based approach is proposed, where both safety and security is considered. Changes in level of autonomy during operation are considered, and an extension of the STPA method is proposed to highlight the interaction between the system and external energy source. A solar-powered and wave-propelled unmanned surface vehicle is analysed. The results show that mission performance may be affected by both safety and security issues, and that considering influences from the environment and the autonomous functionalities of the system together, contributes to identifying hazards. The results are compared to operational experience from multiple field campaigns. The case study focuses on a relatively simple autonomous vehicle, but some functionalities may be shared with Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS). Hence, implications for utilisation of alternative energy sources on MASS, and effects on risks, are discussed.
Many fisheries have significant challenges related to sustainable development, such as overexploitation and overcapacity in the fishing fleet. Overcapacity leads to increased pressure on fish resources, reduced profitability, and environmental problems such as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and acidification fromfuel consumption. Sustainable management of the fish resources is an important objective in Norway, but overcapacity is a problem in several Norwegian fleet segments. Important issues in this respect are whether the traditional management models are able to deal with the capacity development, and whether the role of technology as a relevant discipline in fisheries management is underestimated.The objective of this work has been to integrate a technological perspective into fisheries management in order to improve sustainability in the fishing fleet. The thesis work has been limited to the Norwegian fisheries in Norwegian territorialwaters. Since the main problems addressed in this thesis are sustainability and overcapacity, the system boundaries are limited to the fishing fleet. This means that the marine ecosystem in where the fishing vessels are interacting, is outside the thesis’ boundaries.The main contributions of this thesis are:• Development of a methodological framework that structures fisheries management decision-making, with main emphasis on improved sustainability in the fishing fleet.• Clarification of the concept of sustainability in the Norwegian fishing fleet.• Classification of attributes characterizing sustainability, and a performance evaluation of the different vessel groups in the cod-fishing fleet.• Comparison of two cod-production systems, with focus on sustainability.• Suggestions for how fisheries management can evaluate sustainability on a regular basis.• Improved foundation for further research about sustainability in the fisheries. A lot of literature is collected and synthesized.The framework developed is based on the systems engineering process. The nature of sustainability requires a systems perspective. There are different system analysis methods, but from a technological perspective, dealing with multidisciplinary tasks, systems engineering has been selected as the most feasible process. It has a strong focus on stakeholder needs and requirements, and it facilitates frequent evaluations of sustainability, which is important in order to assess management efficiency and goal achievement.Problems regarding sustainability in the fisheries are not only caused by technological development, but have organizational challenges as well. However, in this thesis the focus is within the technological perspective. Systems engineering is not applied as an attempt to change the structure of fisheries management, but as means of suggesting a decision-making process that improves sustainability in the fishing fleet.Fisheries management involves decision-making in situations often characterized by high risks and uncertainties, and it may be difficult to predict the outcomes of the decisions, for example, regarding sustainability in the fishing fleet. A number of tools that are available to support decision-making have been discussed and used in the thesis, such as cost-benefit analysis, risk acceptance criteria, life cycle cost (LCC), the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), and Quality Function Deployment (QFD). Nevertheless, these tools do not provide “correct” answers; they have limitations, they are based on a number of assumptions, and their uses are based on scientific knowledge as well as value judgments involving political, strategic, and ethical issues. This means that these methods leave the decision-makers to apply decision processes outside the practical applications of the analyses, to which the framework offers guiding principles and structure.The main outcome of using systems engineering principles in fisheries management, is that the framework offers a broader analytical perspective to fisheries management and sustainability, which acknowledge that sustainability cannot be distinguished fromthe context. Today, most input to fisheries management come from biology and economy, such as stock assessments and profitability analyses. In systems engineering, information from different scientific disciplines, for example, biology, social sciences, economy, and technology, are necessary input to the analyses and decision processes, because fisheriesmanagement is much more than bio-economics. Application of the systems engineering process in fisheries management, and the inclusion of technology, introduce new perspectives, new disciplines, and new stakeholders into the decision-making process in the fisheries.Based on the framework developed in the thesis, the sustainability performance of the cod-fishing fleet has been evaluated. Sustainability in the fishing fleet may be characterized by seven attributes; accident risk, employment, profitability, quality, catch capacity, bycatch/selection, andGHGemissions/acidification. Indicators have been identified in order to measure the system performance within the attributes. The evaluation shows that there are differences in the performance of the vessel groups. These differences pose a major challenge to fisheries management in their decision-making regarding sustainability in the fleet. The smallest vessels have the lowest fuel consumption (kg fuel/kg fish), but they have a very high accident risk (FAR). The evaluation of cod fishing vs. cod farming shows that the potential growth in the cod farming industry may cause changes in the management system of the cod fisheries, such as a possible shift from the IVQ-systemof today to an ITQ-system.The Norwegian fisheries management lacks frequent evaluations of its policies, and the information and data available about the fisheries are fragmented. Sustainability should be evaluated on a regular basis by use of performance indicators to determine if sustainability increases or decreases. For simplicity, the indicators could be aggregated into a sustainability index showing the overall system performance. Aggregation implies simplification and weighting of the indicators, which means that such an index should be used with care. Sustainability implies a long term perspective when taking decisions, because future generations will be affected. The performance evaluations can give indications of trends, which means that the results can be used to predict consequences in the future, based on the current development.
This paper employs a combination of literature review and case study methodology to assess the gap between current remotely operated vehicle (ROV) standards and future autonomous IMR operation requirements. With advent of autonomous subsea and underwater vehicle systems, current ROV standards and guidelines may not offer the same benefit in designing and setting guidelines for safe autonomous operations. The reasons for this claim are two-fold. Firstly, the literature review shows that existing requirements in the ROV standards lack specifications related to autonomous subsea interventions. Secondly, the results from the case study demonstrates existence of knowledge and technology gaps, which pose challenges in development of future autonomous IMR operations.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Research has shown that there are potentially disastrous outcomes of human fatigue at sea. The conditions in which the seafarers have to operate are becoming more and more demanding. The study in this article attempts to aggregate accident charts derived from in-depth studies of human fatigue-related accidents to determine common patterns of interlinked fatigue factors. The accidents are analyzed by means of the Cognitive Reliability and Error Analysis Method (CREAM), which in the article has been modified for maritime accidents. The main fatigue factors identified are 'shift work', 'irregular working hours', 'inadequate task allocation', and 'excessive demands'. The study reveals several differences between ship collision and grounding accidents and their corresponding fatigue factors. Human fatigue-related collision accidents are characterized by wrong/badly timed decisions, misconceptions, and poor communication between the vessels. Right before the collision the crew is often panicking and mistakes are easily made. In human fatigue-related groundings, the conditions are often monotonous and the navigating officer has either overlooked the upcoming seabed or simply fallen asleep. Safety climate issues are also identified as important contributors to human fatigue.
As autonomous ships become more viable, appropriate risk indicators are increasingly needed. In the existing literature, few works are related to developing such risk indicators. Existing indicators are general and not focused on a specific autonomous vessel, let alone an actual operating ship. To bridge this research gap, this article proposes a methodology for identifying risk indicators based on a Bayesian belief network (BBN). The methodology is applied to hazardous event "losing navigational control" of a trial-operating autonomous passenger ferry. The risk indicators developed cover technical equipment, remote supervisors' capacity, and environmental conditions. The probability of losing navigational control is calculated considering the states of the risk indicators, which contributes to risk monitoring of the system during operation. Further, strong wind, the state of battery health, end-to-end delay, and packet-loss rate have been identified as critical risk indicators. These should preferably be presented in a shore control center to human operators and provide a basis for decision support, and for defining operational procedures for safe takeover and shared autonomy. The findings can further improve practitioners' understanding, monitoring, analysis, and management of the risk of loss of navigational control of autonomous ships, which is crucial to prevent collisions.
No abstract is provided for this article.
The aquaculture industry has since the 70's grown to become one of the most important industries in Norway.A safety challenge for the Norwegian fish farming companies is escape of salmon.During the last decade, the main cause to escapes has changed from structural failures to "human errors".The paper addresses the need for improving safety in fish farming operations by implementing systematic means for risk management.The objective of this preliminary study has been to evaluate whether the Operational Safety Condition (OSC) method provides a feasible tool for identifying and understanding organisational factors and conditions that influence safety levels at the fish farms.The basis for the study is escape of fish.The results demonstrates that OSC seems to be a promising tool for audits of the organisational safety conditions in aquaculture companies.
Numerous research and industry initiatives have increasingly aimed at developing maritime surface autonomous ships (MASS). Among the motivations for the use of MASS is the potential increase in safety when compared to traditional manned ships – particularly regarding human error. However, in spite of having less human intervention, MASS will rely on humans working on an onshore control center for their operation. There have been great advances in investigating the technical aspects of MASS operation, such as collision avoidance algorithms and detection sensors; nevertheless, possible human tasks and their deriving failures have rarely been addressed. This paper thus explores how humans can be a key factor for successful collision avoidance in future MASS operations. It presents a task analysis for collision avoidance through Hierarchical Task Analysis and making use of a cognitive model for categorizing the tasks. The failures in accomplishing these tasks are further analyzed, and human failure events are identified. The results provide valuable information for the design stage of the system; which must acknowledge the operators’ tasks to ensure a safe voyage. The conclusions of this paper are also a starting point for the implementation of a Human Reliability Analysis for this operation.
Ensuring the safety of advanced maritime vessels is a challenging task. While technological developments provide new options for their design and operation, the criteria for certification, such as class rules intended to ensure safety, may not be flexible enough to accommodate rapid changes. Innovation may enable more efficient, greener, and smarter systems but it may also introduce new hazards that are not addressed by current safety requirements. This paper proposes a method aimed at developing requirement hierarchies that are generic for a family of systems (such as a class of ships) and that can be adapted and specialised for a subset of the family or a particular system. Systems-theoretic process analysis (STPA) is used to develop safety requirements that are structured in a way that ensures that they can easily be kept up to date to accommodate new technological solutions and new alternatives for the design and operation of maritime vessels.
No abstract is provided for this article.
Oil companies and relevant institutions are becoming increasingly aware that effective measures must be put in place to extend the life of installations that are approaching, or have passed, the end of their design lifetime. The implementation of ageing management (AM) facilitates ensuring that the degradation of the installations is properly controlled and mitigated, and their integrity is maintained during the life extension. Integrating AM within an existing process such as maintenance management, which shares various goals and objectives with AM, seems to have several advantages over the alternative of creating a new process for AM. A key issue is to identify and optimize the changes in the maintenance management process for addressing and managing ageing. This paper reports on the use of a systems engineering approach and information models for identifying the “as is” and “to be” processes of existing maintenance management of an oil and gas facility in order to fulfill the new requirements for AM. The primary contribution of this report is to demonstrate the power of these models, combined with a systems engineering process, to reverse engineer legacy practices as the basis for introducing new processes, procedures and training. ©2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 16:
No abstract is provided for this article.
The article introduces a general method for developing a Bayesian Network (BN) for modeling the risk of maritime ship accidents. A BN of human fatigue in the bridge management team and the risk of ship grounding is proposed. The qualitative part of the BN has been structured based on modifying the Human Factor Analysis and Classification System (HFACS). The quantitative part is based upon correlation analysis of fatigue-related factors identified from 93 accident investigation reports. The BN model shows that fatigue has a significant effect on the probability of grounding. A fatigued operator raises the probability of grounding of a large ship in long transit with 23%. Compared to the two watch system (6–6 and 12–12), the 8–4–4–8 watch system seems to generate the least fatigue. However, when manning level, which is influenced by the various watch schemes, is taken into account, the two watch system is preferable, leading to less fatigue and fewer groundings. The strongest fatigue-related factors related to top management are vessel certifications, manning resources, and quality control.
