Subjective operational reliability assessment of maritime transportation system

System reliability assessment is one of the major acts in the operation and maintenance of every industrial and service sector, which also holds true for maritime transportation system. The complexity of the maritime transportation system is a prime obstacle in the evaluation of the operational reliability of the system; mainly due to the fact that statistical data on the important parameters and variables is scarce. This makes the application of fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic a viable option to overcome the data problem with regards to imprecision or vagueness in parameters and variables values. In this paper, the different decisive factors, affecting maritime transportation systems, are modeled in the form of linguistic variables. Techniques such as aggregation, mapping of fuzzy sets using distance measure and fuzzy logic rule base are used to arrive at subjective operational reliability value. The complete procedure is demonstrated with an example. 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.