A new tool for evaluating and training of chemical tanker crew: Seafarer evaluation and training software: DEPEDES (SETS)

Shipping industry is growing regularly and regulative bodies of the industry put more emphasis on safety and environmental management of ships and ship management companies.With regard to the shortage of human resource officers, which will be continued by following years according to latest surveys, shipping industry has hard times to employ qualified officers in their fleets. Especially for chemical tanker ships, it is needed more qualified seafarers regarding to the environmental and safety concern of public and industry. Therefore, training of seafarers has become more important then ever before. Training of seafarers in office environment before sea period is as important as training at training institutions and on-the-job training.Therefore, measuring of seafarers' performance and planning of individual training programs for each seafarer has become more important than ever. In order to develop the quality of seafarer training and consequently maintaining safe and profitable shipping, the factors which are important for evaluating the chemical tanker crew are determined and clustered in hierarchical manner; the weighting of factors for each rank are observed by utilizing Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) Method; the trainings which should be given to seafarers related to scores of evaluation factors are determined then the Seafarer Evaluation and Training Software DEPEDES (SETS) is created by utilizingVisual Basic Software. In this study, the content of SETS software is evaluated with details. Consequently, the main aim of this study is to maintain safe chemical tanker shipping by utilizing SETS software.