Modeling and application of ship traffic conflicts in nearshore waters with heavy traffic

Ensuring the safety of ship navigation is essential to support the sustainable development of the shipping in-dustry, and maritime safety analysis has thus received much attention in the field of shipping. Traditionally, the safety evaluation is mostly performed with the help of accident data, which is thus limited by the insufficient amount of accident data and affects the evaluation effect. In order to overcome this limitation, a ship traffic conflict model is established, which consists of three sub-models: multi-risk ship domain model, ship traffic conflict preliminary screening model and ship traffic conflict detection model. The multi-risk ship domain model is the key foundation, combining the traditional ship domain model with the water traffic conflict severity model to fully consider the severity of ship traffic conflict. To validate the proposed model, three ships in the study waters are selected as the own ships, and the severity of traffic conflicts formed with their target ships within a certain conflict time range are analyzed separately. Then, the conflict datasets obtained from the training of the ship traffic conflict model are used to analyze the traffic conflict situation in the heavily trafficked waters near Tianjin Port. Specifically, the spatial distribution characteristics are obtained using the kernel density estimation (KDE) method and the water grid method, and the temporal distribution characteristics are verified with the help of the accident statistics method. The proposed ship conflict model can provide technical support for further research in the field of ship traffic conflict, and the experimental analysis results are of great significance for strengthening maritime traffic supervision.