On the determination of the maritime-specific EPC values in reducing human factors based on maritime foundering accidents in China

The prevention of ship-foundering accidents is attracting more and more attention from the China Maritime Safety Administration (MSA), which is the competent authority for maritime issues in China. To address the human-related causes involved in ship-foundering accidents, a comprehensive maritime operation human reliability analysis (MOHRA) model is proposed in this study to quantitatively analyze the error-producing conditions (EPCs) contributing to the human-related causes involved in the ship-foundering accidents. For this purpose, the 1207 accident causes are firstly extracted from a collection of 394 ship-foundering accident investigation reports in China, which are then distributed in the framework of human factor analysis and classification system (HFACS), meanwhile, the typical EPCs in the HEART model are also mapped to the HFACS, resulting in the development of relation matrix between EPCs and HFACS aspects. Then, the expert elicitation and fuzzy aggregation analysis are applied together to determine the EPC values of all the error producing conditions. The results show that the overbalance between objectives of safety investment and economic benefit (EPC18) is remarked as the most significant error-producing condition, and the appearance of dangerous incentives (EPC21) may make the situation worse.