Causal Analysis of Ship Accidents in China Coastal Waters Based on Complex Network Theory

The navigational environment for sea-going ships is complex as it involves various influence factors, hence impacts the ship safety and even leads to accidents. To analyse the causation of those accidents, identify the key factors and determine the high-risk scenarios, this study acquires experience of using the complex network in road/air traffic domain, establishes a network model based on the historical accident records and investigates the causation by using causation chains approaches and complex network theory. For the sake of this aim, the study firstly collected five years of accident data in the water along the costal of China and determined the causation chains for each accident. Then, a network model was developed to combine all the determined chains. While using complex network theory, the analysis was illustrated to clarify the characteristic of the developed network and the accident risk under different stages. Ultimately, a conclusion was drawn, highlighting that ship collision is the major type of accidents. The accident risk for ships presented remarkable characteristics of random transition and derivation. Nevertheless, the whole system has high resilience on single failure but is easy to collapse when several incidents exist. This research may provide theoretical support for ship navigation safety supervision as well as maritime transportation system risk prevention.