Analyzing the evolution of ship accident research, recurrent accidents and ship's lifespan

Abstract

This thesis consists of three parts and focuses on the analysis of ship accidents and ship lifespan. Half a century (1965 to 2014) of research developments with respect to maritime accidents are summarized, and future directions are presented. This comprehensive literature review includes 572 papers published in 125 peer-reviewed journals with the following topics: i) the evolution of the geographic location, disciplines, main topics, and dimensions of research; ii) the major causes of maritime accidents, and iii) trends in the methods used and the evolution of data sources. On the basis of the identified research patterns, in this thesis, the focal research topics on maritime accidents were found to have shifted over the past 50 years from navigational issues and ship architecture to human errors. The topics related to maritime accidents continue to expand into socioeconomic factors, and future research on maritime accidents has been suggested. The second study is a statistical analysis of the determinants of a ship's lifespan using the Cox proportional hazards model. This analysis covers the effects of shipping market conditions, safety management factors, and maritime accidents factors on a vessel's lifespan. With respect to these three factors, in this study, vessel lifespan is analyzed from delivery to scrapping with data from 16,551 scrapped vessels. This study demonstrates a method to predict the life of merchant vessels, which can provide information to private businesses for decision-making related to ships and help to formulate public policy on vessel safety and environmental requirements that may result in social welfare loss due to an early withdrawal of merchant ships. Approximately 63% of the world's ship accidents are recurrent. Reducing the recurrence rate can contribute significantly to maritime safety. In this context, the aim of the third study is to find factors that affect both initial and recurrent ship accidents by analyzing the duration between the accidents. The Cox proportional hazards model and its extended models are applied to ship accident data from 1996 to 2015, and the results can be used to identify which ships have a high risk of recurrent accidents, on the basis of ship attributes, ship supply and market conditions, shipbuilding country, previous accident type, and ship type.