Contribution of PSC Authorities to Ship Accident Prevention

Abstract

Historically, several maritime casualties have caused loss of lives or environmental disasters. World states are responsible to eliminate such disasters, along with the improvement and efficiency of goods transportation. To prevent similar cases, states have agreed to enforce international standards to oceangoing ships. For monitoring purposes, each state has empowered its Port State Control (PSC) to inspect foreign ships. Nevertheless, there are arguments that ships are over-inspected while accidents still occur. As a complementary action, some private organisations developed risk-based models, which used inspection results by PSC authorities to rate substandard ships. However, these companies provide the results of ships rating only to their clients. In this paper, it is argued that variations among PSC standards are not included in existing risk-based models. Therefore, in the proposed methodology, a Risk Accident Likelihood Tool is introduced, which is based on the reported ship deficiencies. The innovative idea is that every deficiency is weighted according to the rigorousness of the PSC recording the deficiency. This study shows that the challenges of inspection authorities are mainly caused by insufficient resources or poor organisational issues. Eventually, the proposed risk methodology provides a simplified scoring method. Ships with a high score are more likely to suffer an accident.

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https://doi.org/10.1007/s43069-021-00053-4
ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Contribution ofPSC Authorities toShip Accident
Prevention
HristosKarahalios1
Received: 9 May 2020 / Accepted: 4 January 2021
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG part of Springer Nature 2021
Abstract
Historically, several maritime casualties have caused loss of lives or environmental
disasters. World states are responsible to eliminate such disasters, along with the
improvement and efficiency of goods transportation. To prevent similar cases, states
have agreed to enforce international standards to oceangoing ships. For monitoring
purposes, each state has empowered its Port State Control (PSC) to inspect foreign
ships. Nevertheless, there are arguments that ships are over-inspected while acci-
dents still occur. As a complementary action, some private organisations developed
risk-based models, which used inspection results by PSC authorities to rate sub-
standard ships. However, these companies provide the results of ships rating only to
their clients. In this paper, it is argued that variations among PSC standards are not
included in existing risk-based models. Therefore, in the proposed methodology, a
Risk Accident Likelihood Tool is introduced, which is based on the reported ship
deficiencies. The innovative idea is that every deficiency is weighted according to
the rigorousness of the PSC recording the deficiency. This study shows that the chal-
lenges of inspection authorities are mainly caused by insufficient resources or poor
organisational issues. Eventually, the proposed risk methodology provides a simpli-
fied scoring method. Ships with a high score are more likely to suffer an accident.
Keywords Port state control· AHP-TOPSIS· Ship accident prevention· Ship safety
1 Introduction
A substandard ship may cause significant hazards to crew safety and the marine envi-
ronment. The aim of international maritime regulations is a worldwide unification of
standards such as maintenance of ships, safe cargo operations, navigation, occupa-
tional hazards, and protection of the marine environment. The literature shows that
several ships do not comply with regulations and therefore marine casualties still
* Hristos Karahalios
hristos_karahalios@hotmail.com
1 Maritime Education Department, Pelorus, PO Box76067, Athens, NeaSmyrni, Greece
SN Oper. Res. Forum (2021) 2: 11
/Published online: 3 Febuary 2021
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