Abstract:

In order to ensure the safe operation of autonomous ships, it is necessary to deeply analyze the risk factors of contact accidents and formulate targeted safety prevention and control strategies. Based on the contact accident investigation reports and international literature on autonomous ships, this paper adopts systems theoretic process analysis, the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory method and the fuzzy cognitive map model to analyze the risk causes of contact accidents for autonomous ships from multiple perspectives, and assess the risk level of two typical accident scenarios, namely, berthing/unberthing in port waters and navigating through bridge areas, and base on this, propose corresponding prevention and control measures. The results show that during the port waters, autonomous ships face ten types of key risks such as inaccurate perception and interrupted information transmission and during the bridge areas, there are nine types of key risks such as perceptual blindness and decision-making errors. And insufficient communication and collaboration, significant wind/current interference and other factors are the key triggers of contact accidents for autonomous ships. These factors involve the key control behavior of perception, decision-making, control and communication of autonomous ships, and there is also a complex coupling and amplification effect among different factors. Finally, prevention and control measures are proposed, including improving the ship-shore data exchange protocol and joint exercise mechanism, integrating multi-source sensors and machine learning algorithms, developing a plan for human-machine permission switching, and using VR/AR technology to conduct immersive emergency training.

Key words: autonomous ships, contact accidents, systems-theoretic process analysis (STPA), decision making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL), fuzzy cognitive map (FCM)