Floris Goerlandt

• DSc. (Tech.) MSc.
• Professor (Associate) at Dalhousie University

Quantitative risk analysis (QRA) is widely applied in several industries as a tool to improve safety, as part of design, licensing or operational processes. Nevertheless, there is much less academic research on the validity and validation of QRA, despite their importance both for the science of risk analysis and with respect to its practical implic...

Designing maritime safety management systems commonly follows basic processes which focus on fulfilling the demands of the regulations in the industry. This provokes designing systems with limited application which are not capable to efficiently use the guidance contained in regulatory demands, and more importantly, creating systems which are not c...

Autonomous vessels have become a topic of high interest for the maritime transport industry. Recent progress in the development of technologies enabling autonomous systems has fostered the idea that autonomous vessels will soon be a reality. However, before the first autonomous vessel can be released into her actual context of operation, it is nece...

Recently, there has been a significant interest in industry, regulatory, and academic contexts in the prospects of Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS). Much work focuses on technical developments and discussions on legal, economic, and safety and security implications. There has been less focus and discussion on the role of different societal...

Autonomous vessels are envisioned to enhance safety, improve environmental sustainability, increase efficiency, and reduce costs. With much effort directed towards merchant shipping, technical designs for urban ferries are also under development to facilitate smart mobility. Safety perceptions of such autonomous ferries are likely important drivers...

As ship traffic volumes increase and navigable waters become more complex, vessel traffic service operators (VTSOs) face growing challenges to effectively monitor marine traffic. To address the heavy reliance on human expertise in current ship supervision, we propose a method for quickly identifying high risk ships to enhance the situational awaren...

Ship’s hull girder failure could result from maritime accident that can cause human life loss, environmental disaster, and major economic impacts. In risk-based ship design paradigm, accounting for rare phenomena (e.g. ship-ship collision or grounding) is important to provide safe and durable structure. In-service corrosion-induced hull degradation...

his open access book fills a gap in the literature on shipping in a number of cross-cutting fields (including marine transportation law and policy, law of the sea, Indigenous rights, marine environmental management, and risk and safety studies). Moreover, the book includes a focus on the consideration of Indigenous rights in shipping, a topic of em...

Navigation in polar waters follows standard navigational practice, with special consideration for the presence of sea ice and its expected impact on safe ship operation. Experienced polar ship operators rely on timely access to authoritative sea ice analysis and knowledge of the safe operational limits of their ship to determine the navigability of...

This chapter discusses area-based management (ABM) in shipping in view of developing an understanding of the broad range of tools used and how they are informed by risk and justified by social license. Their purposes are varied and include safety, environmental, security, and public health functions. The chapter first explores shipping-specific and...

This concluding chapter serves to elaborate and extrapolate some of the main points delivered throughout this book’s collection of complementary perspectives on area-based management (ABM) applied to maritime shipping. Researchers and practitioners in this continuously developing field of ABM can benefit from the diverse perspectives provided in th...

Preparedness for and response to marine oil spills are important for protecting the Canadian marine areas, as these risks can have significant environmental, economic, and socio-cultural impacts. The vast sea areas under Canadian jurisdiction, combined with the wide range of maritime activities taking place in these, pose significant challenges to...

Area-based marine management approaches aim to mitigate the risks and impacts of shipping on human safety at sea and on ecosystems in marine and coastal environments. Through various regulatory initiatives and policy practices, risk assessment has been established as an important element to support decision-making for area-based marine management....

Maritime authorities have the administrative responsibility for the safety and security of shipping and the prevention of marine and atmospheric pollution caused by ships. This responsibility involves various tasks that can be supported through effective risk management, but currently, there are no models available to evaluate its level of maturity...

The presented work shows a methodology for the ultimate strength assessment of a ship hull, considering enhanced corrosion modelling. The approach is based on the classical Smith method. However, the recent findings regarding the impact of corrosion degradation on ultimate strength are incorporated. To this end, the stress-strain relationships for...

The Collaborative Multi-Vehicle Arc Routing for Connectivity Problem (MPC-ARCP) is an optimization problem that determines the roads that should be unblocked to reconnect communities that were cut off after a natural disaster. In the MPC-ARCP, isolated communities are linked to critical infrastructures (e.g. ports and airports) according to a prior...

Validation is a prominent challenge in the domain of risk management in general, and hazard analysis in particular. Practitioners have highlighted a lack of clear guidance on how to perform validation of hazard analyses, who should be involved, and when to stop the validation process. Aiming to contribute to addressing this issue, this study propos...

While many hazard analysis techniques exist, little empirical research has been dedicated to their use in industrial contexts, in particular concerning how practitioners validate hazard analyses. This raises questions about the accuracy, comprehensiveness, and credibility of safety analyses, and how practitioners consider this issue in relation to...

Since its inception, the STPA technique has gained increasing popularity among researchers and industry practitioners. Nevertheless, the validity of its application has not yet received much scientific attention. Although some informal validation approaches have been used by STPA users, no formalized validation framework has been elaborated for pra...

Given the complexity of Search and Rescue (SAR) activities in the coastal regions of Eastern Canada and the Arctic, there is a need to objectively assess system capabilities at a high level to determine the expected rescue time for multiple scenarios and system configurations. This paper outlines a new macro-scale generalized SAR model to simulate...

Ships and ports are ripe for operation without humans — but only if the maritime industry can work through the practical, legal and economic implications first. Ships and ports are ripe for operation without humans — but only if the maritime industry can work through the practical, legal and economic implications first.

Maritime accident reporting is performed as a means for experience feedback within and across organizations. While the quality and representativeness of the findings are critical to prevent similar accidents from occurring in the future, various contextual factors concerning the reports can affect the ability of various actors to use these effectiv...

Abstract – Personal data is used to define customer requirements. Organizations should securely collect and process such data, using data protection policies aligned with the applicable regulations. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), an EU data protection law, has include a data protection assessment method called Data Protection Impact...

Towing operations are highly reliant on the experience of the towing operators. Safety concerns arise when towing operations are subjected to environmental disturbances and dynamic traffic conditions. However, a systematic framework and approaches to enhance the safety and automation of towing operations remain lacking. This work proposes a framewo...

Resilience assessment and management of technical systems have been increasingly important as the current applications in the process industries are becoming more complex. Several review papers on resilience management methods and applications have been published by researchers from different aspects. However, none of them put the focus on bibliome...

This article presents a database with geographical and demographic information characterizing the impacts to road and maritime networks, and coastal communities, of a plausible magnitude M9.0 megathrust Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake scenario near Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. The database consists of a medium and a high impact...

Marine oil spills have a detrimental effect on aquatic systems. Yet, it is challenging to select appropriate technologies in the Arctic because of limited logistics support, inclement weather conditions, and remoteness, and limited research has been conducted in this direction. This article suggests a method to rank the oil response technologies, i...

This article presents a database which contains a comprehensive and systematically varied set of network instances. These can be applied as benchmarks for multiple road repair and restoration problems in the context of natural disasters. The characteristics of the instances vary in terms of network size, intensity and type of disaster affecting the...

While the concept of smart shipping is expected to shape the future of the maritime industry, its safety is still a major concern. New risks might emerge when shifting from human controllers onboard, to autonomous software controllers and remote human controllers. The uncertainties associated with the emerging risks require an efficient decision-ma...

Blocked roads can jeopardize emergency response activities in the aftermath of disasters, such as earthquakes. In many cases, the distribution of relief supplies to affected communities, the evacuation of victims, and Search and Rescue activities cannot be resumed due to the lack of connectivity of the road network. The multi-vehicle prize collecti...

Natural and man-made disasters can disrupt road networks. The post-disaster period is usually divided into short and long-term response phases. In the short-term phase, blocked roads can jeopardize emergency operations such as search-and-rescue, evacuation of victims, and the distribution of emergency supplies. The detritus may pose an environmenta...

Escort and convoy are typical operations when a merchant ship navigates in ice beyond its own ice-going capability. In such scenarios, a safety distance between the front ship and the following ship is maintained. The leading vessel may suddenly decelerate or even come to a halt if it encounters a heavy ridge or thick ice floe. When this happens, t...

Natural disasters such as earthquakes can severely impact road networks. Depending on the disaster intensity and the size of the affected area, the network may be divided into multiple disconnected parts. In a disaster response context, decision-makers need to determine the roads that should be unblocked to facilitate relief activities such as sear...

Safety management systems (SMSs) are widely applied across many industrial sectors, and a large body of literature has been published addressing their design, implementation, effectiveness, and associated challenges. This article presents a high-level analysis of the SMS research domain, guided by a set of questions addressing the contents, structu...

Safety climate and safety culture are important research domains in risk and safety science, and various industry and service sectors show significant interest in, and commitment to, applying its concepts, theories, and methods to enhance organizational safety performance. Despite the large body of literature on these topics, there are disagreement...

Highly automated vehicles are making their way towards implementation in many modes of transportation, including shipping. From the safety perspective, it is critically important that such vehicles or the operators overseeing them maintain their sense of the environment, also referred to as situational awareness. The present study investigates the...

Digitalization is becoming a trend in our modern society and systems. Meanwhile, risk analysis and management has rooted and been applied in various fields. Therefore, there is an increasing need to integrate risk analysis and management into the coming digital society. Risk has been represented digitally by the product of probability and consequen...

Risk perception is important in organizational and societal governance contexts. This article presents a high-level analysis of risk perception research using Web of Science core collection databases, scientometrics methods and visualization tools. The focus is on trends in outputs, geographical and temporal trends, and patterns in the associated s...

Risk Analysis was first published in 1981, established with a vision to provide a platform for inquiry into fundamental risk‐related concepts and theories, and to disseminate new knowledge about methods and approaches for identifying, analyzing, evaluating, managing, and communicating risk. The journal has also contributed significantly to a scient...

In harsh environments, offshore oil and gas support operations are subjected to frequent logistics and supply chain operational disruption, due to harsh environmental factors with their associated risks. To capture these stochastic influential factors and support related decision making, it is helpful to develop a robust and dynamic probabilistic m...

Even though validation is an important concept in safety research, there is comparatively little empirical research on validating specific safety assessment, assurance, and ensurance activities. Focusing on model-based safety analysis, scant work exists to define approaches to assess a model’s adequacy for its intended use. Rooted in a wider concer...

Several risk management frameworks have been introduced in the literature for maritime Pollution Preparedness and Response (PPR). However, in light of the actual needs of the competent authorities, there is still a lack of framework that is established on a sound risk conceptual basis, addresses the different risk management decision-making context...

This article presents a bibliometric analysis and mapping of the Chinese process safety research, focusing on the contributions made in core process safety journals and on the influences of international collaborations and knowledge sources on the developments of this research domain. Collaboration networks, term co-occurrence networks, and co-cita...

This paper introduced a new ship domain concept and an analytical framework. The ship domain takes the point of the ship’s first evasive maneuver as a basis and correlates it with the navigator-perceived collision risk level. The first evasive maneuver of a ship is detected based on the ship turning point identification and ship intention estimatio...

Society is concerned about maritime accidents since pollution, such as oil spills from ship accidents, adversely affects the marine environment. Operational and strategic pollution preparedness and response risk management are essential activities to mitigate such adverse impacts. Quantitative risk models and decision support systems (DSS) have bee...

Purpose This study aims to improve understanding of how coastal maritime transport system of Vancouver Island would be disrupted in disaster events, and the strategies could be used to address such risks. Any transport disruption at the maritime leg of the supply chain can affect the needs of vulnerable residents and thus, the supply of many goods...

With the diminishing extents of Arctic sea ice, Arctic shipping becomes increasingly attractive for the shipping industry. Voyages along Arctic sea routes have seen a significant increase in recent years. Given the harsh environment, shipping operations in the Arctic constitute a hazardous activity for people onboard vessels, while vessels pose ris...

The Baltic Sea is a unique and sensitive brackish-water ecosystem vulnerable to damage from shipping activities. Despite high levels of maritime safety in the area, there is a continued risk of oil spills and associated harmful environmental impacts. Achieving common situational awareness between oil spill response decision makers and other actors,...

Coastal communities are vulnerable to the consequences of disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis. Often, such communities are heavily dependent on maritime transportation for the ingress of essential goods such as food, fuel, and medicine. Major natural disasters can cause damage to critical infrastructures, causing disruptions to l...

Ships navigating in ice inevitably encounter different ice conditions. Dynamic ice typically presents severe conditions when it is moving perpendicular towards the parallel midship section, which can lead to ships getting stuck in ice. This can cause delays for ships or even damage to the ship hull. However, there currently is no model to assess sh...

In 2017, the Journal of Integrated Security Science was founded at the Safety and Security Science section at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. Now, in 2021, we are happy to announce that we are rebranding the journal by taking it into an adjusted thematic and theoretical avenue: with a new journal name, a revised scope and updated e...

Safety and security are often considered in complimentary or opposing terms. Discussions on their conceptual meaning have been put forward, and calls for an increased integration of these domains have been made. Nevertheless, there is currently no high-level empirical comparison of the development and contents of these research domains. In this art...

Ship collision is the most common type of accident in the Northern Baltic Sea, posing a risk to the safety of maritime transportation. Near miss detection from automatic identification system (AIS) data provides insight into maritime transportation safety. Collision risk always triggers a ship to maneuver for safe passing. Some frenetic rudder acti...

Scientometrics analysis is increasingly applied across scientific domains to gain quantitative insights in the development of research on particular (sub-)domains of scientific inquiry. By visualizing metrics containing quantitative information about such a domain, scientometric mapping allows researchers to gain insights in aspects thereof. Method...

The risk of a large-scale oil spill remains significant in marine environments as international maritime transport continues to grow. The environmental as well as the socioeconomic impacts of a large-scale oil spill could be substantial. Oil spill models and modeling tools for Pollution Preparedness and Response (PPR) can support effective risk man...

Many coastal communities are heavily dependent on maritime transportation for the ingress and egress of people and goods. Any major transportation disruption can have a significant negative impact on the safety, health and wellbeing of affected communities, this is due to the interruption in the availability of food and the supply medicines and fue...

Bridge alarms are a plausible way to reduce the ship collision probability by timely alerting the officer on watch of a conflict. However, there currently are no dedicated methods for alerting a stand-on ship to compensate the unawareness of or inactive response of a give-way ship to dangerous encounter situations. Therefore, this article proposes...

Ship performance in level ice involves problems such as attainable speed and maneuverability under different ice thickness. As the alternative to analytical methods, numerical simulation models have been proposed in recent years to improve the accuracy and to analyze more complex operations. However, current numerical models use quite diverse appro...

This chapter is a proactive risk exploration of hypothetical remotely operated search and rescue (SAR) ships in the Canadian Arctic. The harsh and remote environment in the region, combined with complicated coastlines and many uncharted or poorly charted traffic routes, makes it one of the most challenging SAR areas. Canada has committed itself to...

The diminishing extent of sea ice in Arctic areas brings opportunities for increased shipping activities in the Canadian Arctic. However, it also causes concerns, e.g., related to environmental pollution to vulnerable areas and impacts on ecosystems at local, regional, and global scales, which can further impact human health. Increased shipping act...

Maritime transport faces new safety-related challenges resulting from constantly increasing traffic density, along with increasing dimensions of ships. Consequently, the number of new concepts related to Decision Support Systems (DSSs) supporting safe shipborne operations in the presence of reduced ship manning is rapidly growing, both in academia...

The recovery effectiveness for oil spills in ice conditions depends on a complex system and has not been studied in depth, especially not from a system risk control perspective. This paper aims to identify the critical aspects in the oil spill system to enable effective oil spill recovery. First, a method is developed to identify critical elements...

Various national maritime authorities and international organizations show strong interest to implement risk management processes to decision making for shipping accident prevention in waterway areas. There is a recurring need for approaches, models, and tools for identifying, analysing, and evaluating risks of shipping accidents , and for strategi...

Risk communication is a significant research domain with practical importance in supporting societal risk governance and informed private decision making. In this article, a high-level analysis of the risk communication research domain is performed using scientometrics methods and visualization tools. Output trends and geographical patterns are ide...

Dr. M. Sam Mannan is one of the true pioneers in the process safety area, spending almost his entire lifetime in process safety and risk research. He was dedicated to ‘make safety second nature’ and published an impressive body of work. An overview of his research helps understanding the process safety area and provides insight in the legacy of thi...

The COVID-19 global pandemic has generated an abundance of research quickly following the outbreak. Within only a few months, more than a thousand studies on this topic have already appeared in the scientific literature. In this short review, we analyse the bibliometric aspects of these studies on a macro level, as well as those addressing Coronavi...

Dr. Kletz is one the pioneers in the process safety area, known widely for his work on inherent safety design and loss prevention. He worked 38 years in Imperial Chemical Industries, and became a fulltime researcher only after his retirement. He published more than 200 papers and 15 books during his retirement. The intellectual basis analysis prese...

The COVID-19 global pandemic has generated an abundance of research quickly following the outbreak. Within only a few months, more than a thousand studies on this topic have already appeared in the scientific literature. In this short review, we analyse the bibliometric aspects of these studies on a macro level, as well as those addressing Coronavi...

The lack of situational awareness is a major cause of ship collisions. Thus, enhancing the situational awareness of the stand-on ship is a key for navigational safety, where the intention estimation of the give-way ship is crucial. According to COLREGs, the stand-on ship is not allowed to take evasive actions until the give-way ship does not take p...

Along with the expansion of China's chemical industry, a series of catastrophic chemical accidents have occurred, often with severe human casualties, resulting in adverse effects on the sustainable development. In line with these developments, process safety research is also developing rapidly in China. This paper aims to present insights in the pr...

Over the last decades, process safety has been an important area of academic inquiry, aiming to build knowledge which can contribute to reduce the occurrence of industrial accidents in the process and chemical industries, or to mitigate their consequences. Knowledge in this interdisciplinary research domain is created using applied science, enginee...

The safe navigation of ships is of high societal concern. A promising approach for analysing waterway risks is using non-accident critical events as surrogate indicators of collision accidents. These are typically detected in data from the Automatic Identification System (AIS). Recognizing the significant interest in this approach, this article pro...

The climate change has made the transit through Arctic area more feasible, which demands reliable methods to evaluate ship performance. Ship performance in ice is a cross-scale problem, where the desired output such as ship speed lies in larger scale while the actual ship-ice interaction happens in smaller scale. Due to insufficient knowledge in ic...

This open access book is a result of the Dalhousie-led research project Safe Navigation and Environment Protection, supported by a grant from the Ocean Frontier Institute’s the Canada First Research Excellent Fund (CFREF). The book focuses on Arctic shipping and investigates how ocean change and anthropogenic impacts affect our understanding of ris...

Slip and fall incidents at work remain an important class of injury and fatality causing mechanisms. An extensive body of safety research has accumulated on this topic. This article presents an analysis of this research domain. Two bibliometric visualization tools are applied: VOSviewer and HistCite. Samples of 618 slip and fall related articles ar...

A safety management system (SMS) is the common means used by organizations to assess organizational performance with respect to the safety and well-being of people, property and the natural ecosystem. A SMS provides confidence to diverse stakeholders that organizational safety is at an appropriate level and fulfils the applicable regulatory standar...

The Polar regions are increasingly in focus in recent years. Both the Antarctic and Arctic sea areas are receiving more and more ship visits. Therefore, understanding ship-ice interaction and ice loads, especially with thick ice, is a vital step to avoid possibly disastrous accidents and environmental damages to these sensitive regions. This paper...