Risk Analysis, Vol. 36, No. 6, 2016 DOI: 10.1111/risa.

12519

Maritime Transportation Risk Assessment of Tianjin Port

with Bayesian Belief Networks

Jinfen Zhang,1 Ângelo P Teixeira,1 C. Guedes Soares,1,∗ Xinping Yan,2 and Kezhong Liu3

This article develops a Bayesian belief network model for the prediction of accident conse-
quences in the Tianjin port. The study starts with a statistical analysis of historical accident
data of six years from 2008 to 2013. Then a Bayesian belief network is constructed to express
the dependencies between the indicator variables and accident consequences. The statistics
and expert knowledge are synthesized in the Bayesian belief network model to obtain the
probability distribution of the consequences. By a sensitivity analysis, several indicator vari-
ables that have influence on the consequences are identified, including navigational area, ship
type and time of the day. The results indicate that the consequences are most sensitive to the
position where the accidents occurred, followed by time of day and ship length. The results
also reflect that the navigational risk of the Tianjin port is at the acceptable level, despite
that there is more room of improvement. These results can be used by the Maritime Safety
Administration to take effective measures to enhance maritime safety in the Tianjin port.

KEY WORDS: Bayesian belief networks; maritime transportation; risk assessment; Tianjin port

1. BACKGROUND Over 200 ships arrive or leave Tianjin port every

day on average. Consequently, how to guarantee the
Tianjin has been one of the largest sea-port in
safety and security of marine transportation has been
northern of China, whose main business is general
one of top concerns.
cargoes and containers. Tianjin port has commercial
The channel of Tianjin port is man-dredged, in
exchanges with more than 180 countries and has over
which 300,000 tonnage ships can navigate during tide
500 calls from liner shipping routes every month. In
rising period. The Maritime Safety Administration
2013, its throughput exceeded 500 million tons, in-
(MSA) plays an important role in ship traffic organi-
cluding over 13 million TEUs of containers. It has
zation and several steps have been taken to enhance
been the fourth largest port over the world. As a re-
safety. The measures include mainly mandatory
sult, the ship traffic flow of the approach channel is
declaration and reporting regulation for entering
increasing steadily and has been a busy waterway.
and leaving the port waterway, real-time monitoring
of traffic situation by vessel traffic system (VTS), safe
1 Centre for Marine Technology and Ocean Engineering (CEN- speed regulation, one-way traffic for large ships and
TEC), Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa,
dangerous cargo ships, channel suspension in heavy
Portugal.
2 Intelligent Transport Systems Research Centre, Wuhan Univer- weather, etc. In addition, a compound sea-route
sity of Technology, Wuhan, China. organization regulation has been proposed, taken
3 School of Navigation, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan,
effect in 2014, which requires that large ships navi-
China. gate in the main channel and small ships navigate in
∗ Address correspondence to C. Guedes Soares, Centre for

Marine Technology and Ocean Engineering (CENTEC), In-

the subchannels bilateral of the main channel. The
stituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal; regulation reduced the mutual interference between
c.guedes.soares@centec.tecnico.ulisboa.pt large and small ships to a large degree. Despite the

1171 0272-4332/16/0100-1171$22.00/1 
C 2016 Society for Risk Analysis
1172
above measures, maritime accidents and incidents
still occur and cannot be avoided completely. Some
accidents even result in serious property loss (such
as total loss of ships), fatalities, and environmental
pollution.
Risk assessment is one of the most effective ways
to identify and reduce the risks of maritime trans-
portation in a sea area and to find the most effective
ways to manage the risk. The main objective of this
article is to carry out a risk assessment for Tianjin
port approaches based on statistics of historical acci-
dent data from 2008 to 2013 and Bayesian Network
modeling of accident consequences using historical
data and expert knowledge.
The rest of the article is organized as follows:
Section 2 provides a literature review of research
work on maritime risk assessment. In Section 3,
statistics of accident data from 2008 to 2013 in Tianjin
port are analyzed in terms of ship type, accident loca-
tion and time among others. In Section 4, a Bayesian
belief network (BBN) is developed for evaluation
of accident consequences based on accident statistics
and expert knowledge. Accident scenarios occurred
over the years is then compared in terms of proba-
bility as well as consequences. Conclusions on the re-
sults of the research on risk assessment on the Tianjin
port and some limitations of BBN model are drawn
in Section 5.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
Risk assessment has been one of top concerns
in hazardous industrial sectors, including maritime
transportation. The main purpose is to find the indi-
cators that have dominant influence on safety and to
find ways to reduce risk as far as possible. Risk is usu-
ally defined and measured by the probability of an
accident, along with the possible consequences that it
may result in.(1) With respect to maritime transporta-
tion risk, the consequences are usually measured in
terms of economic loss, human injuries or casualties,
and environmental pollution. The International Mar-
itime Organization (IMO) proposed a Formal Safety
Assessment (FSA) procedure for risk management
in the Maritime Transportation System (MTS). It is
composed of five steps, which are hazards identifica-
tion, risk assessment, development of measures for
reducing risks, cost–benefit analysis, and selection of
risk control options (RCOs).(2) One of the biggest
challenges for MTS risk assessment is the scarcity of
historical data, even though it is collected over a long
period. Prior knowledge from domain experts has
Zhang et al.
been recognized as a valuable information source for
a real-world risk assessment and there are methods
to describe expert opinions in probabilistic terms and
to incorporate them in risk assessments.(3) Another
challenge is that the models that are purely based
on historical data are reactive rather than proac-
tive. Montewka et al.(4) pointed out that reactive ap-
proaches are usually passive, not systematic, and are
limited to forecast the effect of the changes of vari-
ables on risk. In order to overcome such shortcom-
ing, several frameworks(5,6) have been proposed to
estimate both the probability and the possible con-
sequence of accidents.
MTS carries large uncertainties derived from
the influences of system complexity, environmental
factors, human and organizational factors (HOFs)
among others.(7,8) Quantitative risk assessments
(QRA), which synthesize historical data and expert
knowledge, have attracted much more attention than
qualitative approaches since it has been introduced
into the maritime domain.(2,9) Several QRA models
have been introduced and widely used, such as fault-
or event-tree analysis (FTA, ETA),(10–13) evidence
reasoning (ER),(14) belief rule base (BRB),(15)
BBNs(16–19) among others. Literature reviews on
maritime risk assessment have been provided by
researchers from different perspectives. Li et al.(20)
provided an overview on QRA models by summa-
rizing 87 relevant academic papers. Their focus was
on collision and grounding risk analysis using ETA
and traffic flow theory. Mazaheri et al.(21) made an
extensive literature review on ship grounding and a
framework of knowledge-based risk modeling that
comply with FSA that was issued by IMO was subse-
quently proposed. Goerlandt et al.(22) paid attention
to the foundation issues of maritime transportation
risk analysis including risk definitions, perspectives,
and some scientific approaches.
Among the approaches that been applied to
maritime transportation risk analysis, BBN can
easily represent the dependencies of events related
with accident by using conditional probability tables
(CPTs).(23) Besides that, BBN has other advantages
over other models, such as the ability of inverse
inference,(19) and updating network with new obser-
vations. Hänninen(24) made an in-depth discussion
on the challenges and benefits of BBN for appli-
cation to maritime transportation risk assessment.
The research concludes that BBN is a well-suited
methodology for maritime risk assessment and
decision-making, although it has some problems
related to probability elicitation from experts and
Maritime Transportation Risk Assessment
model validation. The research also pointed out that
BBN has advantages in term of continuous updat-
ing when new data is available. Due to the above
advantages, BBN is being applied more extensively
to maritime safety area. To list some, Van Dorp
et al.(25) and Merrick et al.(16,17) studied maritime
accident risk using traffic simulation and Bayesian
multivariate regression to deal with data-scarcity
and uncertainty problems. On the basis of traffic
simulation of San Francisco Bay, risk impact of
three ferry expansion alternatives were studied,
followed by uncertainty analysis. Moreover, they
also evaluated the risk level and developed most
effective risk reductive measures.(25) Their research
also indicates that Bayesian approach is appropriate
to deal with epistemic uncertainties.(16) Antão and
Guedes Soares(26) studied the influence of the sea
state on the occurrence of maritime accidents using
BBN. Hänninen et al.(27) studied the effect of service
implementation on collisions and groundings using
BBN by expert elicitation. The experts’ subjective
probabilities on the service’s direct effect on many
factors are processed in the model. The results
indicate that the enhanced information service can
promote navigation service. They also pointed out
that the model needs further improvement because
of some discrepancies between the results and
experts’ qualitative opinions. Hänninen et al.(28)
developed a maritime safety assessment model, in
which the accident data, incident data, and port
state control (PSC) inspection data were synthesized
along with expert knowledge using BBN to see the
safety situation of 23 subareas. Zhang et al.(15) made
navigational risk estimation for the Yangtze River
with BBN. The BBN structure was constructed
based on correlation analysis of 10 parameters
of 455 recorded accidents in 2009. Navigational
risk was measured by the accident probability and
consequences. By inverse inference, the results
indicate that ship length, ship type, and seasonality
have strong correlation with the consequences of
an accident. Norrington et al.(29) developed a BBN
model for reliability analysis of search and rescue
operations. The statistical analysis of secondary data
was used as a complement. The authors pointed out
that the detailed model brings difficulty for valida-
tion. Wu et al.(30) focused on the influence of weather
condition on the risk of fishing vessels in Atlantic
Canadian waters using data correlation statistics.
The study indicated that concentration of ice has
the biggest influence on the magnitude of incident.
Buurman, et al.(31) tried to find the most effective risk
1173
reduction options from system design perspective.
Monte Carlo simulations and genetic algorithms
have been used. The idea of Bayesian update has
been utilized in the model to combine the available
data with new information. Akhtar and Utne(32)
studied the relationship between human fatigue and
groundings. The model is composed of qualitative
and quantitative parts. The qualitative part was
constructed based on the human factor analysis and
classification system (HFACS) and the quantitative
part was done by correlation analysis of 93 recorded
grounding reports. Their research indicates that
fatigue operation can increase the grounding proba-
bility in 23% for long transit navigation. Montewka
et al.(4) and Helle et al.(33) carried out a similar
research on the cost–benefit analysis for oil spill
clean-up with BBN. Expert knowledge, historical
data as well as information from literature were used
in the model and the results enable the managers to
develop cost–effective strategies against the oil spill.
By taking full use of the advantages of BBN men-
tioned above, this article develops a navigation risk
model of the Tianjin port using BBN. The depen-
dencies between the indicators related with accident
consequences will be defined based on a statistical
analysis of the accident database from Tianjin MSA
and expert surveys. Navigation risk is then evaluated
taking into account accident probability as well as its
consequences.
3. ACCIDENT DATA STATISTICS
3.1. Data Source
The Tianjin MSA is responsible for maritime
transportation safety management and by recording
all the accidents and incidents occurred in the sea
area of Tianjin port. The data used in this section
is based on the accident database of Tianjin MSA
from 2008 to 2013. The data base collects the time,
position, and type of accident, the involved ships in-
formation (ship flag, type, and size). Unfortunately,
the consequences of accidents were recorded quite
briefly. For the majority of the accidents information
on the economic loss or the severity of ship damage,
and environmental pollution were not available.
Only a few of them provided the number of fatal-
ities. Moreover, it should be noted that locations
of accidents were recorded roughly, rather than in
longitude and latitude format. As there are many
buoys along the approach channel and they all have
1174 Zhang et al.

Table I. Traffic Volume, Number of Accident and Accident Rate

in the Tianjin Port

Traffic No. of Accident Rate

Year Volume Accidents (per ship)

2008 99,599 32 3.21×10−4

2009 96,138 47 4.89×10−4
2010 97,276 62 6.37×10−4
2011 99,576 40 4.02×10−4
2012 82,080 15 1.83×10−4
2013 78,238 38 4.86×10−4

Average 92,151 39 4.23×10−4

Fig. 1. Distribution of the ship type involved in the accident in the

been numbered, the locations were recorded by
the number of the buoy which is most close to the
accident. When the accidents occurred far away
from the channel, the locations were recorded by
longitude and latitude.
The situation of this database is typical of many
accident databases in many countries. To improve
this situation it is necessary to model the ship
accidents as a sequence of events in which human
factors are taken in proper consideration.(34) This
can be done using established approaches such as the
CASMET methodology(35–37) or the TRACER(38)
for example. It is then necessary to have the database
design with the appropriate taxonomy,(39) in order to
properly register the causes of the accident and the
influencing factors. Until this is done worldwide in
the Maritime Administrations, most of the accident
statistics are limited to the main cause of the accident
as described in Guedes Soares and Teixeira(40) and
as used in the present article.
The data set used in the present study contains
234 accidents that occurred between 2008 and 2013,
including collisions, contacts, groundings, sinkings,
and fires. Besides accident data, the traffic flow is also
needed to calculate the accident rate. So the num-
ber of ships entering and leaving Tianjin port are
also obtained during the years. Table I presents the
overall statistics on the total number of ships and ac-
cidents, which allows the evaluation of the accident
rate. When compared with the Gulf of Finland where
the accident rate lies between 1.0×10−4 and 8.4×10−4
per ship,(41) it can be seen that Tianjin port has sim-
ilar accident rate with the same order of magnitude.
Note that the number of entering and leaving ships
is 3,353 in July 2006,(41) the traffic flow in the Gulf of
Finland is much smaller. As a result, the annual oc-
currence of accident is higher in Tianjin port.
studied sea area.
3.2. Data Analysis
In this section, a statistical analysis of the acci-
dent data in the Tianjin port is carried out in more
detail. Fig. 1 presents the ships involved in the acci-
dents. It can be seen that over half (52%) are cargo
ships, followed by oil tankers (13%). Tug boats and
working ships consists of 17% of the total and the
proportion for containers is 5%. Table II presents the
number of ships involved in accidents, the ship traf-
fic in the period from 2008 to 2013, and the accident
rates of different ship types. It should be noted that
the number of ships involved in accident is not the
same of that in table I due to the fact that some of the
accidents did not record the ship type information. It
can be seen that tug boats has the highest accident
rate, followed by oil tankers despite the fact that the
number of these two types of ships is not the highest.
Although the accident rate of cargo ship is not the
highest, the number of cargo ships involved in acci-
dents is much higher than of the others because it is
the dominant ship type in the Tianjin port.
Figs. 2 and 3 present the distributions of the ac-
cident in each month of the year and the time of a
day, respectively. The accidents in March, April, and
May are the most among a year, while accidents in
February are the least. When looking at the time of
the day, it can be seen that accidents are most likely
to occur between 8 a.m. and 12 a.m., followed by
the time between 12 a.m. and 16 p.m. This is a lit-
tle counter-intuitive because it is generally believed
that accidents are more likely to happen during night
than during the day. However in this case the traffic
during the day is much higher than the traffic at night,
which may explain the situation.
Maritime Transportation Risk Assessment 1175

Table II. Accident Rate for Different Types of Ships in the Period 2008–2013

Cargo Ship Container Tug Boat Oil Tanker Working Ship Others

Ships involved in accident 85 9 15 21 14 21

No. of ship traffic 366,356 58,608 27,756 43,293 11,113 45,781
Accident rate (per ship) 2.32×10−4 1.54×10−4 5.40×10−4 4.85×10−4 1.26×10−4 4.59×10−4

Fig. 2. Accidents occurred in each month

during the years 2008 and 2013.

Fig. 3. Time of the day for the accidents occurred in the Tianjin port.

Accidents tend to have geographical charac-
teristics. For example, the depth of seabed varies
and groundings in shallow waters are more likely
than in deep waters. Collisions in high ship density
channels are usually more than in other sea areas.
Fig. 4 presents the location of the sea area in the
Tianjin port. Only the traffic in the northern channel
is considered. As the traffic density in the northern
channel is the highest because almost all ships would
pass through it to enter or leave the port, the channel
is divided into four areas. In Areas 3 and 4, there
is a subchannel which allows navigating small-size
ships on both sides of the main channel and Area 4 is
treated as the precautionary area since the beginning
of 2014. It should be noted that the south channel has
just been constructed and the traffic volume is very
small and there is no recorded accident within this
area. So this sea area is not included in the risk assess-
ment model. The accidents that are not within the
four areas are classified as “outside channel.” These
accidents mainly occurred in the entrance of the
northern channel, the anchorage area near the port,
1176
Area 4
Area 3
Fig. 4. Approach channel of the Tianjin port and regional division for geographical accident statistic.
Fig. 5. Types of accidents in each area of the Tianjin port.
among others. Due to the fact that some geograph-
ical data was missing, the accidents with no recorded
geographical position are treated as “unknown.”
The distribution of accidents that have occurred
in the four areas and outside the channel is shown
in Fig. 5. As can be seen in the figure, collision is
the dominant type of accident in the whole sea area.
The number of accidents in Area 4 is much larger
than in the others and is dominated by groundings,
which indicates that this area carries the highest risk.
The Tianjin MSA treats it as precautionary area to
enhance traffic management there. The number of
Zhang et al.
Area 2
Area 1
other types of accident is much smaller and they have
no apparent statistical correlation.
Fig. 6 shows the distribution of the length of the
ships involved in the accidents. It can be seen that
a lognormal distribution has satisfactory agreement
with the frequency distribution. Most of the involved
ships lie between 50 to 100 m. A small proportion of
the ships are larger than 200 m. It should be noted
that the consequences tend to be higher if a larger
ship is involved in the accident. Although there are
few cases, they would have great influence on navi-
gation risk.
Maritime Transportation Risk Assessment
Fig. 6. Distribution of the lengths of ships involved in accident.
4. MARITIME RISK MODELLING BY BBN
As the probability of accident has been obtained
by the historical accident data and traffic flow data,
which is shown in Table I, the focus of this section
is on the prediction of the possible consequences
given the condition that an accident occurs. Proba-
bilistic consequences analysis will be studied based
on the statistics of historical accident and expert
knowledge.
4.1. Fundamentals of BBN
A BBN is usually expressed by a directed acyclic
graph (DAG), which consists of a set of nodes and
directed edges between the correlated nodes. Each
node denotes a variable and has several collectively
exhaustive and mutually exclusive states. The proba-
bility distributions of parent nodes are expressed by
prior knowledge. The relationship between any pair
of correlated nodes is built up by a CPT. The proba-
bility distributions of descendent nodes are derived
from their parent nodes along with the correspon-
dent CPTs by using Bayesian rules. An illustrative
example is given to state the mechanism of BBN. Fig.
7 shows a BBN with three nodes, which have two
states. Node A and B are the parents of C. The CPT
which reflects the dependencies of C with A and B
are shown in Table III. The probability distribution
of C can be obtained by the combination of prior dis-
tributions of A and B and the CPT with the following
1177
Table III. CPT for Node C with Parents A and B
A = a1 A = a2
B = b1 B = b2 B = b1 B = b2
C = c1 0.8 0.2 0.3 0.4
C = c2 0.2 0.8 0.7 0.6
formula:

2
P(C = ck) = P(A = ai )P(B = b j )
i, j=1

P(Ck  A = ai , B = b j ), k = 1, 2 . (1)
BBN also has the ability of making inference
given some new information. For example, Fig. 7(b)
presents the inference given the observation that A =
a1 . Fig. 7(c) presents the inference given the observa-
tions that A = a1 and B = b2 . It should be noted that
the size of CPT grows fast with the variable states.
Too much historical data or expert knowledge is re-
quired and it may be difficult for experts to fill in
the CPT. It should also be noted that the computa-
tion grows fast with the number of variable states. It
may be troublesome for a large BBN. As a result, the
states should be as few as possible that can reflect the
characteristic of the variables.
4.2. BBN for Maritime Risk Assessment
4.2.1. BBN Structure
A BBN model of maritime risks in the Tian-
jin port in terms of consequences is analyzed here.
The consequences are measured by indicators that
are related to economic loss and fatalities. Five vari-
ables are used as the prior knowledge from historical
data, which are seasonality, time of day, area, ship
type, and ship length. These factors may have impact
on one or some of the consequences types. In prin-
ciple, the structure of BBNs can be developed us-
ing logical models, data correlation analysis, experts’
opinions, literature review, or the combinations of
the above.(4,5,15,33) In this case, a logical model for
“day/night” can be constructed by considering the
time of accident and seasonality. The structure is
constructed partially based on the national standard.
For instance, the classification standard for maritime
accidents of China(42) measures the consequence
of a maritime accident in terms of ship tonnage,
1178 Zhang et al.

Fig. 7. Illustrative example of BBN.

(a) (b)

(c)

Table IV. Classification on Maritime Consequence from MoT

Negligible Minor Major Catastrophic

Ships over 3,000 Below minor Serious injury, or economic loss 1-2 fatalities, or economic loss Over 2 fatalities, or economic
gross tonnage accident between 500k and 3,000k between 3,000k and 5,000k loss over 5,000k RMB
RMB RMB
Ships between 500 Below minor Serious injury, or economic loss 1-2 fatalities, or economic loss Over 2 fatalities, or economic
and 3,000 gross accident between 200k and 500k RMB between 500k and 3,000k loss over 3,000k RMB
tonnage RMB
Ships below 500 Below minor Serious injury, or economic loss 1-2 fatalities, or economic loss Over 2 fatalities, or economic
gross tonnage accident between 100k and 200k RMB between 200k and 500k RMB loss over 500k RMB

Fig. 8. BBN structure for accident consequences prediction.

direct economic loss, and fatalities. Moreover, six ex-
perts from the Tianjin MSA have been interviewed.
They gave the opinions on the dependency between
indicators according to their experience, which can
be treated as a reference. The BBN structure for
the prediction of accident consequences is shown in
Fig. 8. The dependencies among the indicators are il-
lustrated as follows.
(1) The accident consequence is dependent on
ship damage, fatality, and ship length. This
is based on the classification standards for
maritime accidents,(42) published by the Min-
istry of Transportation (MoT) of China. In the
classification, consequences are divided into
four levels, which are negligible, minor, ma-
jor, and catastrophic. The classification scales
are shown in Table IV. In the BBN model,
Maritime Transportation Risk Assessment
economic loss is mainly measured by ship
damage. As there is no historical data on ship
tonnage, ship length is used instead to reflect
the ship tonnage.
(2) Ship damage is affected by accident type and
ship type. For example, ship sinking will re-
sult in total loss while accidents like injuries
and overboard are not likely to damage the
ships. Furthermore, accident type is depen-
dent on area, which indicates that accident
has geographical characteristics as shown in
Fig. 5.
(3) Fatality is affected by accident type, area and
time of the accident (depicted by day/night).
Most interviewees from Tianjin MSA be-
lieve that loss of life is heavily dependent on
the timeliness of search and rescue (SAR).
The performance of SAR depends on the
distance to the accident and visibility among
other factors. Based on the meteorological
data of Tianjin port, there are only five days
per year on the average in which the visibil-
ity is below 1,000 m caused by fog in each
year on average. Therefore, visibility is mainly
depending on whether the accident occurred
during the day or night. It can be determined
by season and time of day along with the
time of sunrise and sunset during four sea-
sons in the Tianjin port, which is shown in
Table V.
4.2.2. Prior Probabilities and CPTs of BBN Model
Based on the BBN structure, the inference of
consequence can then be made with prior distribu-
tions of root nodes and the CPTs of child nodes. The
prior distributions of all the root nodes can be ob-
tained by the statistics of accident in Section 3. The
distribution of “ship type” is derived from Fig. 1, in
which the probability of cargo ship is 0.52 and the
probability of oil tanker is 0.13, and so on. The dis-
tributions of “season” and “time of day” are based
on the data from Figs. 2 and 3. It should be noted
that the states of “time of day” are set according to
the time of sunrise and sunset in each season in the
Tianjin port. The CPT from “season” and “time of
day” to “day night” can be further determined so
as to distinguish “day” from “night.” The distribu-
tion of “area” is based on the results from Fig. 4, in
which the CPT between “area” and “accident type”
is also available. The probability of “ship length” at
each state is obtained by integral of the lognormal
1179
Table V. Time of Sunrise and Sunset in the Four Seasons in the
Tianjin Port
Season Sunrise Time Sunset Time
Spring 06:13 18:23
Summer 04:45 19:40
Autumn 06:00 18:10
Winter 07:26 16:52
distribution in Fig. 5 in the correspondence intervals.
The CPTs for “accident” type and “day night” are
depicted in Tables VI and VII, respectively. It can
be seen from Table V that many probabilities are 0,
which means there is no occurrence during the years
from 2008 to 2013. However, it needs to be pointed
out that it does not mean that they would not happen
given longer period of historical data. The probabil-
ities for “day night” are on the basis of the time of
sunrise and sunset in each season and it can be seen
that all of them are certain versions with probabilities
0 or 1.
The CPTs of other nodes such as “fatality” and
“consequence” are not available from historical
accident data. Subjective knowledge is used instead.
Six experts from Tianjin MSA have been invited to
give their subjective opinions on the nodes. Three of
them are from the vessel traffic service (VTS) center
with working experience of five to twenty years and
the others are from vessel endorsement station with
5-year working experience. The experts were re-
quired to focus on the probability distributions in the
CPTs which are not available from historical data.
Noting that it is not easy for the experts to give a
quantitative value in a direct way, some instructions
have been given to them to facilitate their work.
It is generally accepted that it is much easier for
experts to cope with qualitative rather than quanti-
tative problems.(43,44) The first instruction is that the
mapping between qualitative levels and probability
values were given to experts, including (almost)
impossible (0), uncertain (0.25), fifty-fifty (0.5),
possible (0.75), and (almost) certain (1). The experts
determine that the probability would be under cer-
tain state or between two states. Then they can give a
proper value on the probabilities. This is similar with
the approach adopted by Hänninen et al.(27) Due to
the fact that the CPTs contain many very small prob-
abilities, the second instruction is that the experts
can consider the probabilities from a frequency per-
spective. For instance, the experts can determine that
the probability can be between 1 in every 10 cases
1180 Zhang et al.

Table VI. CPT between “Area” and “Accident Type”

Area 1 Area 2 Area 3 Area 4 Outside channel Unknown

Collision/Contact 0.71 0.93 0.83 0.56 0.74 0.74

Grounding 0.18 0 0.17 0.39 0.11 0.16
Flooding 0.04 0 0 0 0 0.03
Overboard 0.04 0 0 0.02 0.11 0.04
Fire 0 0.04 0 0.03 0 0.03
Injury 0.03 0.03 0 0 0 0
Sinking 0 0 0 0 0.04 0

Table VII. CPT for “Day/Night” Given the “Season” and “Time of Day”

Time of day 0445–0600 0601–0726 0727–1652

Season SP SM AU WT SP SM AU WT SP SM AU WT

Day 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 0 1 1 1 1
Night 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0

Time of day 1653-1810 1811–1940 1941-0444

Season SP SM AU WT SP SM AU WT SP SM AU WT

Day 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0
Night 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 1 1

SP = spring, SM = summer, AU = autumn, WT = winter.

and 100 cases in the first step. Then they can assign
a value between 0.01 and 0.1 to the probability.
In this section, the average of their subjective
probabilities is used to construct the CPTs. The CPTs
from each expert will be considered separately in
the sensitivity analysis in the following section. The
dependency between “consequence” and its parent
nodes is shown in Table VIII. It should be noted
that according to Table III, the consequence should
certainly be “catastrophic” given that at least one of
its parents is at the worst state. The probabilities of
some of these combinations are not listed in the table.
Table IX presents the CPTs for “ship damage.”
It is obvious that the probability of total loss should
be 1 for sinking. Moreover, due to the fact that
sinking was recorded individually, no matter if it
was caused by collision, grounding, or other types of
accident, the probability of total loss for other types
of accident should always be 0. Some other CPTs are
not presented in detail due to their large size, such
as “fatality.” However, it should be noted that there
are several unanimousnesses among the experts,
such as the probability of at least one fatality is much
higher for “sink” than for other types of accident,
the probability of fatality is higher during night
than daytime despite distinctions not being so large.
Moreover, since it is not easy for experts to give the
probability distributions for “fatality” when the acci-
dent location is “unknown,” the probabilities where
the area is “unknown” are assigned to be the average
of the values in “Areas 1–4” and “outside channel.”
4.2.3. Results and Analysis
By combining historical data with expert
knowledge with Hugin lite software(45) in the BBN
structure, the prediction on consequence is shown
in Fig. 9. It can be seen from the result that most
of the accidents have not resulted in very serious
consequences. Over a third of the accidents have
no apparent consequence and almost half of them
just have minor loss. Despite that, about 15% of
them are treated as major or catastrophic accident,
which the MSA should pay special attention to. One
of the most distinctive features for major accident
is low frequency with serious consequences.(46,47)
Most of the experts believed that trying to avoid
major accidents is the most effective way to enhance
maritime transportation safety although it is a big
challenge.
Maritime Transportation Risk Assessment 1181

Table VIII. CPT for Consequence Derived from Expert Knowledge

Fatality 0

Ship length (m) <100 100–200 >200

Ship damage ND SD SE ND SD SE ND SD SE

Negligible 1 0.32 0 1 0.29 0 1 0.24 0

Minor 0 0.65 0.62 0 0.67 0.56 0 0.69 0.47
Major 0 0.03 0.38 0 0.04 0.44 0 0.07 0.51
Catastrophic 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.02

Fatality 1–2

Ship length (m) <100 100–200 >200

Ship damage ND SD SE ND SD SE ND SD SE

Negligible 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
Minor 0 0 0 0 0.69 0.61 0 0 0
Major 1 0.74 0.66 1 0.31 0.39 1 0.62 0.51
Catastrophic 0 0.26 0.34 0 0 0 0 0.38 0.49

ND = no damage, SD = small damage, SE = serious.

In order to evaluate the maritime safety perfor-
mance in depth, the result obtained here along with
the accident rate at Tianjin port will be compared
with the risk assessment results of the Yangtze
River. The results of consequences are a probability
distribution and need to be transformed into certain
version to evaluate the risk. In their research, utility
value has been introduced to transform the belief
structure into a certain version. The utility values
used in Zhang et al.(15) for negligible, minor, major,
and catastrophic are 200; 500; 3,000; and 40,000
respectively. These utility values are also used
in this article in order to compare the results of
consequences under the same scale. The probability
distribution can then be transformed into risk index
value by using the following formula:

4
U= pi vi .
i=1
where U is the consequence index value of conse-
quence. pi is the probability that the consequence is
under certain state and vi is its correspondence util-
ity value. By using the above, the risk index value of
Tianjin port can be obtained. The average is 1,483
compared with 5,712 of the Yangtze River. It indi-
cates that the consequence of accidents in the Tian-
jin port is generally much less serious than that
of the Yangtze River. One possible explanation is
that the navigation situation in the Yangtze River is
much more complex than in the Tianjin port.(48,49)
There are much more multi-ship encounter situations
and the collision avoidance decision-making would
be more difficult.(50) Moreover, the channel covers
rather spacious area and the navigation environment
varies a lot among the upper-stream, mid-stream,
and downstream, which makes it a challenge work
for the transportation safety management.(44) Also
the hydro-meteorological conditions have great in-
fluence on navigation safety. On the contrary, the
Tianjin port covers a smaller sea area and it has
better navigational infrastructure. The navigation
risk is mainly due to the complexity of ship traffic
flow.
Moreover, it should be noted that the subjective
knowledge used in Fig. 9 is the average of six experts.
However, there is some degree of distinction among
(2)
the individuals, which will result in certain fluctua-
tion of the consequence. Fig. 10 presents the lower
and upper bounds of each state of consequence from
each expert’s knowledge. It can be seen that there is
certain fluctuation for each grade of accident, which
reflects the distinctions among the experts’ subjective
opinion. It can be seen that the probability of negligi-
ble and minor consequences fluctuate the most while
catastrophic is the least. But noting that the utility
value for catastrophic is much higher, a small fluctu-
ation will exert great influence to risk index. In order
1182 Zhang et al.

Table IX. CPT for “Ship Damage” from Expert Knowledge

Ship Type Cargo Ship

Accident Type Collision Grounding Flooding Overboard Fire Injury Sink

No damage 0.31 0.12 0 0.62 0 0.82 0

Small damage 0.62 0.83 0.48 0.37 0.87 0.18 0
Serious 0.07 0.05 0.52 0.01 0.13 0 0
Total loss 0 0 0 0 0 0 1

Ship type Oil Tanker

Accident Type Collision Grounding Flooding Overboard Fire Injury Sink

No damage 0.24 0.08 0 0.86 0 0.95 0

Small damage 0.59 0.70 0.31 0.14 0.68 0.05 0
Serious 0.17 0.22 0.69 0 0.32 0 0
Total loss 0 0 0 0 0 0 1

Ship Type Working Ship

Accident Type Collision Grounding Flooding Overboard Fire Injury Sink

No damage 0.22 0.18 0 0.65 0 0.89 0

Small damage 0.62 0.75 0.45 0.30 0.77 0.11 0
Serious 0.16 0.07 0.55 0.05 0.23 0 0
Total loss 0 0 0 0 0 0 1

Ship Type Containers

Accident Type Collision Grounding Flooding Overboard Fire Injury Sink

No damage 0.25 0.28 0 0.84 0 0.95 0

Small damage 0.73 0.68 0.37 0.15 0.94 0.05 0
Serious 0.02 0.04 0.63 0.01 0.06 0 0
Total loss 0 0 0 0 0 0 1

Ship Type Others

Accident Type Collision Grounding Flooding Overboard Fire Injury Sink

No damage 0.26 0.17 0 0.74 0 0.91 0

Small damage 0.64 0.73 0.40 0.24 0.82 0.09 0
Serious 0.10 0.10 0.60 0.02 0.18 0 0
Total loss 0 0 0 0 0 0 1

to see the extent of the risk index value, an optimiza- mum value of U and the second one finds the mini-
tion model is constructed, which is shown as follows: mum value of U. By solving the above optimization
models, risk index value between 1,240 and 1,638 was

4
obtained, which are also much smaller than that of
max / min U = pi vi
i=1 the Yangtze River. It can be seen that the probabili-
s.t. pimin ≤ pi ≤ pimax , i = 1, ..., 4. (3) ties of “negligible” and “minor” fluctuate a lot, which
4 indicates that there are high uncertainties in the an-
pi = 1
i=1
nual occurrence of incidents and small accidents. The
It should be noted that the above optimization probability of “major” accident also carries certain
model is composed of two models. The two models uncertainty around 10% whereas “catastrophic” has
have the same constraints. The first finds the maxi- the least uncertainty.
Maritime Transportation Risk Assessment 1183

Fig. 9. Prediction on consequence of the accidents in the Tianjin port.

Fig. 10. Results in prediction of consequence

with BBN model.

A more comprehensive picture of maritime risk Table X. Accident Rates for Maritime Accident Consequence
in the Tianjin port can be seen when consequence Classifications in the Tianjin Port
is analyzed along with the accident rate shown in Negligible Minor Major Catastrophic
Table I. The minimum, maximum, and average val-
ues of accident rate related to different consequence Lower bound 7.74×10−4 8.26×10−5 1.91×10−5 3.93×10−6
classifications are presented in Table X. It can be Upper bound 2.91×10−4 3.11×10−4 7.18×10−5 1.48×10−5
seen that the probability of catastrophic accident is Average 1.79×10−4 1.91×10−4 4.41×10−5 9.09×10−6
one or two orders of magnitude lower than of neg-
ligible and minor accidents. Moreover, when tak-
ing the traffic volume into consideration, the mag- Table I. So the magnitude of major accident rate is
nitude of annual traffic volume is 104 according to between 10−1 and 1 per area-year and that of the
1184 Zhang et al.

catastrophic accident is between 10−1 and 10−2 per

area-year. There is 1 catastrophic accident every 5
to 14 years in the Tianjin port. During the year 2008
and 2013, one catastrophic accident has occurred on
June 20 of 2009. A Panamanian bulk cargo ship with
gross tonnage of 75,676 has collided with a Cambo-
dian general cargo ship with gross tonnage of 9,965.
The bulk cargo ship has been seriously damaged
and sank afterwards. This means that there is one
catastrophic accident in the Tianjin port in 6 years,
which lies within the magnitude of the result ob-
tained from the model. This result partially validates
the model. Despite that, the accident rates for ac-
cidents with smaller consequences calculated by the
model need to be further validated when new infor-
mation is available.

4.3. Sensitivity Analysis

The main purpose of a sensitivity analysis is to
find the key indicators that have great impact on the
consequence of an accident so that countermeasures
can be taken on them to reduce consequences. In the
research of Zhang et al.,(15) sensitivity was analyzed
by comparing the change of navigational risk index
value when gradually changing the probability distri-
bution of several indicators. Hänninen et al.(28) have
analyzed the change of probability of overall safety
management being adequate given more and more
knowledge on the nodes. In this article, the sensitivity
analysis is done by comparing the results given that
a certain indicator is under different states. Further-
more, a sensitivity parameter is proposed to quantita-
tively describe the degree that each indicator would
influence the consequences.
Fig. 11 presents the state probability distribu-
tions of consequences given that the indicators are
at certain state. It can be seen that the consequences
are the most sensitive to accidents locations. This is
generally accepted by the experts when they saw the
result. Moreover, from the beginning of 2014, a new
transportation regulation came into effect, in which
by setting Area 4 as the precautionary area. Accord-
ing to Fig. 11, the model can reflect the geographical
characteristic of risk situation. The accident outside
the channel may result in the largest consequence
and Area 4 is the most risky segment of the approach
channel of the Tianjin port. According to Fig. 5, the
number of accidents in Area 4 is the most among
the navigable areas. So there is still a lot of room to
improve traffic management in this area to enhance Fig. 11. Probability distributions of consequences under different
safety. variable states.
Maritime Transportation Risk Assessment
Fig. 12. Sensitivity values of different indica-
tors.
In order to make a comparison of the degree of
influence on the consequences by the indicators, the
parameter of sensitivity value is proposed. The sensi-
tivity value is defined as follow:
1  |Ui − U|
4
Sk = . (4)
Nk 1 − pi
i=1
where Sk is the sensitivity value of a node; Nk is
the number of states; Ui is the utility value of con-
sequence given that the node is under the ith state;
U is the average utility value of consequence; pi is
the prior probability of node under the ith state.
The sensitivity values for four nodes are presented in
Fig. 12. It is obvious that the sensitivity value of
“Area” is much larger than others, which reflects that
consequence is the most sensitive to the location of
accidents. According to Fig. 4, Area 4 is the inter-
section of two traffic flows from the north and west
of the channel. It can be assumed that there would
be much more encounter situations in this area than
other areas, which would make the traffic density
much higher and increase collision risk to a large de-
gree. So one of the most effective ways to improve
safety is to enhance the traffic organization (e.g., by
defining a traffic separation scheme) to reduce the
possibility of collision avoidance operations for the
ships navigating in this area.
Moreover, “day/night” also has large impact on
consequence. It can be derived that navigational risk
1185
is higher during night than during the day. So it would
be beneficial for risk management by paying special
attentions to traffic monitoring and the safety dur-
ing the night time. Ship type and ship length are less
sensitive to the consequences of accident, which in-
dicates that small ships carry similar risk with large
ships.
5. CONCLUSIONS
Safety issues have been one of top concerns in
the maritime transportation industry. In this article, a
BBN model has been constructed for risk assessment
of the approach channel of the Tianjin port. The
focus of the model was on the consequences of the
accidents. The BBN model synthesizes all the avail-
able knowledge in a systematic way. The knowledge
is mainly composed of historical accident data in the
Tianjin port and subjective knowledge from experts
in the maritime transportation domain. According
to a sensitivity analysis, the proposed model is satis-
factory robust to the variations of expert knowledge.
Moreover, some unanimous opinions can also be
found between the results from the BBN model
and experts’ qualitative opinions. Despite that, the
model needs continuous improvement when new
knowledge becomes available. The model is useful
for providing a full picture of maritime risk both
in the probability and consequence of accidents in
1186
the approaches to Tianjin port. Sensitivity analysis
identified some key indicators that will influence the
consequences of the accidents. Some insights were
provided to improve the risk management. The most
effective ways mainly include improving the traffic
management in Area 4, enhancing the performance
of SAR operations, and paying special attention to
traffic management during the night time.
It should be pointed out that the Tianjin MSA
has taken effective steps to enhance the safety. Area
4 has been treated as the precaution area and a traf-
fic separation regulation has also come into effect re-
cently since the beginning of 2014. Further research
is necessary to compare safety situation before and
after the implementation of the regulation to eval-
uate its performance. One possible way is making
transportation simulations under new rules. The sim-
ulation results can be treated as inputs of the BBNs
model to see the change in the consequences of ac-
cident. Moreover, the accident outside the channel
carries the largest risk, although its occurrence rate is
not high. The experts believe that the reason is that
the accidents are far from the SAR stations. So an-
other effective way is to improve the performance of
SAR operations and reduce the salvage time.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The first author has been funded by the Por-
tuguese Foundation of Science and Technology
through its annual funding to the Centre of Ma-
rine Technology and Ocean Engineering. The work
was supported by National Science Foundation of
China (NSFC) (grant no. 51579203). The work was
also supported by Key Project in the National
Science & Technology Pillar Program (grant no.
2015BAG20B05) and Marie Curie Actions (grant no.
FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IRSES). The authors would like
to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their
constructive comments on the article.
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