A hybrid approach to near-miss report investigation towards next-generation safety solutions on-board ships

The human element is a key aspect of safety at sea. It is highlighted as the most contributing factor to the various accidents, incidents, hazardous occurrences and near-miss events onboard ships. This paper proposed a hybrid approach to systematically identify the causations leading to the occurrence of near-miss events onboard ships. The methodology is based on Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) and Analytical Network Process (ANP). The HFACS investigates the potential causes under unsafe acts, pre-conditions for unsafe acts, unsafe supervision, and organizational influences. As dependencies among the selected causes are observed in the near-miss report prescreening, the ANP proved to be a suitable method for consistently clustering and prioritization. The hybrid approach is demonstrated with published 2828 near-miss reports of 25 different shipping companies in 3 years period. A novel contribution of this study is to strictly provide preventive action recommendations from safety engineering, information and communication technology perspectives. The validity of conventional and next-generation safety solutions is tested and benchmarked with the responses from ship management companies. Since the near-miss analysis is recently a focal requirement of maritime conventions and third-party inspection regimes, this study encourages marine technology providers to promote next-generation safety solutions on-board ships.