Rough Set Approach to Marine Cargo Risk Analysis

Considering the complication of shipping techniques, high mobility of cargoes and poor condition and uncertainty during the voyage, there are numerous risks in the transportation process. With the burgeoning of shipping volumes, the occurrence of accidents and disruptive events could bring huge losses. Despite of regulatory control such as the establishment of International Safety Management (ISM) Code, the rate of shipping accidents has not been reduced to the desired levels. Therefore, it is paramount to establish an effective risk quantification and management mechanism for shipping companies and to improve risk control process in order to cover the various components of the operating system. This paper provides a systematic and practical rough-set-based marine cargo risk analysis approach with the aim to find out the influential risk factors. Together with industry inputs, a comprehensive set of risk evaluation indicators considering various factors affecting shipping operations is developed. The study uses Rough Set method to classify and judge the safety attributes related to marine cargo and vessel. The method which is based on intelligent knowledge acquisition provides an innovative way for evaluating marine cargo risk. As illustrated by an example of a shipping company, we are able to calculate the significance of each factor and the relative risk exposure based on the original data without assigning the weight subjectively. Risk mitigation strategies can be formulated accordingly.