A Risk Model for the Operation of Container Vessels

Commercial shipping of containerized goods involves certain risks for human safety and environment. In or-der to actively manage these risks, they must be identi-fied, analyzed, modeled, and quantified. This requires a systematical analysis of design and operation of con-tainer vessels. Within the EU-funded research project SAFEDOR, a Formal Safety Assessment has been ap-plied to establish the current safety level of generic container ships and to identify potential cost-effective risk control options. This paper describes a structured approach to develop the underlying high-level risk model. It is structured as risk contribution tree consist-ing of a series of fault trees and event trees for the ma-jor accident categories. Statistical analysis of casualty data is used to estimate the probability of occurrence. Finally, the summation over all individual risk contribu-tions yields the current risk profile for the operation of container vessels is presented as FN-curve