Probabilistic Selection of Ship-Ship Collision Scenarios

Within the framework of quantitative risk assessment and management in the design stage, it is essential to select relevant sets of accidental scenarios, while a huge number of possible scenarios are obvious. The current industry practices are likely based on prescriptive approaches for the most unfavorable accidental scenarios. However, these approaches are often inadequate for obvious reasons because they may result in too large values of design loads in some cases but they may underestimate design loads in other cases. In the present study, an innovative method using probabilistic approaches is suggested to select relevant sets of ship-ship collision accident scenarios which represent all possible ones. Historical database for each of individual collision parameters which is dealt with as a random variable have been collated and are analyzed by statistical methods to characterize the probability density distributions. A sampling technique is then applied to select collision scenarios. Applied examples to a double hull oil tanker are presented to demonstrate the applicability of the developed method.