Gesa Praetorius

Maritime traffic management: a need for central coordination?

Traffic management is not formally organised in the maritime domain. Ships are autonomous and find their own way. Traffic is organised through rules, regulations, and “good seamanship”; it is a distributed system. In areas of high traffic-density support is proved by vessel traffic service (VTS) to promote traffic safety and fluency. VTS does not take control. This organisational structure has proven itself in situations with sufficient resources. When resources become insufficient (e.g. not enough sailing space), the traffic needs an organising mechanism. In this article, the authors argue that the most promising way to do this is by organising centralised planning coordination, whilst leaving maritime traffic a distributed system with no additional central control.

Control and Resilience Within the Maritime Traffic Management Domain

This article presents research conducted within the Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) domain. VTS is a service that is provided close to ports and geographically challenging areas to support merchant vessels in their navigation. Although VTS is legally an advice and assistance service, applying concepts from Cognitive Systems Engineering and Resilience Engineering can highlight how the joint human-machine system works to promote safe and efficient traffic movements. The VTS is a Joint Cognitive System that maintains control through a mixture of opportunistic and tactical control. Strategic control is only partially supported by the higher levels of system aggregation that provide the basis for defining daily operations within the settings of the VTS. To increase the VTS system’s ability to anticipate, respond, monitor, and learn, and therefore the ability to be resilient, there is a need to promote more strategic and tactical control within daily operations.

FRAM in FSA - Introducing a Function-Based Approach to the Formal Safety Assessment Framework

Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) is a structured methodology in maritime safety rule making processes. FSA takes organizational, technical and human-related factors into concern. While the method allows for the use of expert input during the identification of hazards and risk control options, the FSA guidelines give preference to assessment methods grounded in quantitative risk assessment. No specific guidance is given on how expert input should be obtained. This article therefore presents the findings of a pilot study with the objective to introduce the Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) as a method to enrich FSA studies through structured expert input. Two focus groups (n = 6) were conducted to compare hazards and risk control options identified in one scenario with the help of fault tree analysis and FRAM. The results of the study show that FRAM has the potential to enrich hazard identification as a complementary tool.

Situation awareness and maritime traffic: having awareness or being in control?

Situation awareness (SA) is generally seen as a mental representation of the system state, an objective measure of the ‘situation out there’. In this article, the authors make an argument that SA can only have a meaning in relation to the task of the user and characteristics of the system. This will be argued with the help of a specific environment: vessel traffic monitoring. The long-time constants and the complex constraints imposed on the ship require that the operator monitoring the traffic has a good SA: the operator must make long-term predictions about possible traffic developments. For this, being in control and having SA are inseparable characteristics of the same process.

'Safety is everywhere' - The constituents of maritime safety

Although maritime safety is one of the key terms in regulation, guidelines and recommendations, such as SOLAS (International Convention for the safety of life at sea (IMO, 1974), in the shipping domain, there is, to the best of our knowledge, neither an explanation of this specific type of safety nor any explicit understanding on how it is promoted by those who work on board of merchant vessel. This qualitative study approaches maritime safety from a crew perspective and discusses what constituents should be considered to be part of maritime safety.

Exploring Bridge-Engine Control Room Collaborative Team Communication

The EC funded CyClaDes research project is designed to promote the increased impact of the human element in shipping across the design and operational lifecycle of ships. It addresses the design an ...

Have a Healthy Lifestyle or Organize Work – Creating Healthy Shipboard Work Environments

This paper presents findings from a study concerning the work environment on board Swedish passenger vessels. The study explored work-related experiences of personnel in the service department (hotel, restaurant, catering, shops) based on individual and group interviews, observations, survey data and social insurance statistics concerning sick leave longer than 60 days. The results of this paper are based on ten semi-structured individual and group interviews with 16 respondents. The respondents were HR personnel from six shipping companies and crewmembers working onboard.

Underlying Causes of and Potential Measures to Reduce Long-term Sick Leave Among Employees in the Service Department on Board Swedish Passenger Vessels

This paper presents findings from a workshop focused on the physical, social and organizational work environment in the service department on board Swedish passenger vessels. Twentyseven maritime p ...