An integrated risk assessment based on uncertainty analysis for cargo vessel safety

The use of risk analysis methods as decision support tools is getting more and more acceptance to analyze, recover or mitigate potential risks in engineering applications. Integrated risk analysis techniques lead to obtain more reliable and realistic solutions. In this paper, ‘Fuzzy Based Risk Assessment’ has been used and systematically incorporated in terms of a set of plausible model scenarios leading to cargo vessel accidents at the coasts and open seas of Turkey. Through the analysis, four main aspects of uncertainty proposed by authors, i.e. level of understanding, quality of knowledge, uncertainty level of cargo ship accidents and sensitivity levels of model parameters, are integrated to model parameters to analyze cargo ship accidents. In order to investigate the effects of uncertainty parameters to model parameters, the paper incorporates ‘Fuzzy Set Theory’, ‘fuzzy analytic hierarchy process, AHP’ and ‘fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution, TOPSIS’ methods due to the nature of subjectivity and ambiguity of the parameters in uncertain marine environment. ‘fuzzy analytic hierarchy process’ is used to analyze and determine the weights of the aspects of uncertainty while ‘fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution’ is employed for ranking the model parameters. The case study demonstrates the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed methodology. As a result, a risk perspective for the integrated risk management and decision making process is presented.