Risk assessment of collisions of an autonomous passenger ferry

Autonomous transportation is an increasingly popular concept and is gradually becoming a reality. This transformation also changes the way people travel. For example, the autonomous ferry is an emerging alternative for residents living in coastal areas. To evaluate the safety of an autonomous ferry, a thorough safety review is necessary. This paper makes an initial attempt by developing a model for performing a risk assessment of collisions between an autonomous ship with manned vessels and applying this to a specific ferry operating in a canal. The safety barriers to prevent a collision are identified, as well as the respective failure modes. A Bayesian belief network is employed to model the collision and to quantitively assess the collision risk of the autonomous ferry. Relevant data are collected to perform a quantitative risk analysis. By running the model, the likelihood of a collision is calculated. A sensitivity analysis is also performed to identify the most contributing causes.