A Domain-Based Model for Identifying Regional Collision Risk and Depicting Its Geographical Distribution

In recent years, the increasing volume and complexity of ship traffic has raised the probability of collision accidents in ports, waterways, and coastal waters. Due to the relative rarity of collision accidents, near misses have been used in the research to study the collision risk in the relevant water areas. However, the factor of near miss identification is usually limited to the relative distance between ships, and the instantaneous quantification and geographical distribution of collision risk is not paid enough attention. Therefore, this article proposed a domain-based regional collision risk model that can quantify the collision risk by detecting near miss scenarios. The proposed model is capable of quantifying the collision risk in the water area instantaneously and periodically and can be used to depict the geographical distribution of collision risks in combination with a grid method and the spatial interpolation technique. To validate the proposed model, some experimental case studies were carried out using automatic identification system (AIS) data from the Bohai Strait. The results show the capability and advantage of the proposed model in regional collision risk identification and visualization, which is helpful for maritime surveillance when monitoring and organizing ship traffic and may therefore contribute to the improvement of maritime safety