Guidelines to Assess the Safety of Marine Traffic-III : Evaluation of Shiphandling Difficulty and the Human Factors

Abstract

To compare the shiphandling difficulties of ports and harbours, human factors must be excluded. The reason is that the stress which is imposed on the mariner may be concealed by mixing individual differences based on the mariner's techniques, skills and personality in the shiphandling result. In the present paper, the concept of "Latent Environmental Stress" is introduced to avoid the influence of the individual differences of mariners and to guarantee the universality of the results in evaluating the shiphandling difficulty. The latent environmental stress is defined as the stress value found by the application of a standardized shiphandling process as follows. The own vessel proceeds along a fixed course at a fixed speed. And it does not take any action to avoid collision with other ships.