The maritime industry is a dangerous and highly technologicallysaturated sector. Unfortunately, advancement in automation and technologyhave not minimised human error as intended. Interaction between humansand technology in the industry is also overtly pre-scripted. The main reasonfor this is to reduce human error by ensuring predictability in interaction.Ultimately, investigations of non-routine interaction are often based on a hind-sight view of what went wrong in a given situation. This article analyses acollection of non-routine interactions that derive from a larger data corpus,using Discursive Psychology and Conversation Analysis. It argues that such astudy can capture what is missing from some investigations, namely, whatmakes sense for crews in the context of a given non-routine situation. Despitethe constraints and the challenges of technological complexity, this articleargues that reframing psychological matters in non-routine technologicallymediated interaction can be a new way of showing how such matters aredynamic, visible and manageable. This can inform the general debate of howto minimise human error, and more specifically, provide insight into the increas-ing inclusion of technology and as a consequence, the equally increasingamount of technologically mediated interaction that we will see in the future.
Piracy has unfortunately become a health and safety risk for seafarers in the maritime industry today. However, little do we know about the impact of a pirate hijacking situation and how seafarers cope. Focusing on negotiation communication, the analysis debouches in a discussion of the dynamics of coping strategies, by investigating 173 authentic audio recordings of communication sequences recorded during a pirate hijacking situation that were donated voluntarily by a shipping company. The Captain assessed and reflected on the course of events in the situation, to which the negotiator responded appropriately, with acknowledging brief responses or psychological aid. This is similar to other highly dynamic decision-making settings, where decision-makers tend to continuously reflect and revise their view of the situation (Eraut 2000). The data is also consistent with the “reflection-in-action” concept by Schön (1983) used by van den Heuvel et al. (Cogn Technol Work 16: 25–45, 2014) in their investigation of communication of police officers in hostage situations. However, the coping dynamics changed when the negotiator’s responses became too minimal. This shows how the context and the individual’s cognitive appraisal of the encounter co-shapes the coping dynamics in the situation. It is urged that pre-piracy care and seafarer training involves practical examples and information about roles and coping dynamics in negotiation communication as part of an orchestrated approach to the scourge of piracy.
The safety of people and cargo onboard is a key functionality of a commercial ship.
The health and well-being of seafarers and passengers is protected through an extensive set of technical specifications, standards and norms that govern the design and commissioning of all vessels.
They differ by ship type and size, while the specific services to be provided and the specific geographic regions to be served also play an important role in this respect.
The requirements are of national and international character and vary also with the classification society that will commission the ship. Thus in a broader sense, all competences related to ship design are related one way or another to maritime health.
Much of the design of ships is overseen by a naval architect or marine engineer. It is rare to have the involvement of a medical professional except in the cruise industry.
Purpose and tasks
To ensure that the design of a ship includes the requirements to protect the health and well being of seafarers. More specifically, to identify areas of intervention that go beyond the usual engineering curricula where, nonetheless, the safety dimension is embedded through international standardization.
Until now, wave-energy developers have focused on designing large machines for utility-scale electricity generation. While many concepts with good capture performance have been devised, significant commercial success has yet to be achieved in this market. Smaller wave energy converters (WECs) for specialist uses have received less attention. Emerging applications for these machines include powering sensors for ocean monitoring and providing energy for recharging maritime autonomous vehicles. Small reliable floating WECs can provide both the low levels of power required for these applications, and a surface platform for satellite
communications. Here, the key idea is to reduce costs and increase human safety by deploying small WECs to perform tasks that would otherwise require a ship. Developing small WECs for specialist uses provides a fast route to market, thereby creating a viable financial and technical base for the development of larger devices for applications where more power is required. This paper reports early results of time- and frequency-domain simulations of a compact WEC designed for monitoring the ocean environment.
The report focuses on analysing on-deck accidents in offshore environments using data from the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) which covers the period 1980-2005. It applies the Accident Anatomy (AA) method, which maps accident causes and consequences using fault trees and cause-consequence diagrams (CCDs). Unlike previous analyses, this report aims to extract deeper insights into accident patterns beyond general statistics.
For this report, on-deck operations involve material handling, tool use, and equipment operation in offshore environments.
The study analysed 10,846 records that cover accident events on both fixed and floating offshore units. The report focuses on cases where injuries or fatalities occurred. The analysis described in the report mapped 77 accident-prone operations and provides a detailed causal understanding of offshore accidents.
Despite the exhaustiveness of the analysis, there are limitations related to the used data. The HSE records primarily document physical and operational aspects of the accidents, leaving out design-related or organisational factors. Next, probabilities for the accident events considered in the analysis are not provided. This is due to the incomplete nature of the sources and the lack of information on the number of opportunities for accidents. The computation of probabilities will be feasible if data on the frequency of use of relevant components, machines, personnel, and workplaces has been also collected.
The power system of an all-electric ship (AES) establishes an independent microgrid using the distributed energy resources, energy storage devices, and power electronic converters. As a hybrid energy system (HES), the power system of an AES works as a unified system where each part can affect the reliability of the other parts. The systemic reliability centered maintenance (SRCM), which efficiently enhances the reliability and safety of the AES by identifying optimal maintenance tasks of the AES, is considered in this article to apply to the entire system. In order to calculate the reliability and optimal maintenance schedule, the Markov process and Enhanced JAYA (EJAYA) are utilized. A layer of protection analysis (LOPA), which is a risk management technique, is adopted to assess the safety of the system. A hybrid molten carbonate fuel cell, photovoltaic (PV), and lithium-ion battery are considered as energy sources of the AES. Based on two common standards, DNVGL-ST-0033 and DNVGL-ST-0373, the suggested maintenance planning method can be used in industrial applications. Eventually, in order to validate the proposed method, a model-in-the-loop real-time simulation using dSPACE is carried out. The obtained results show the applicability and efficiency of the proposed method for improving reliability and safety.
This is an informational document that communicates the account of SDU participants of the MISSION project on how to prove whether the system being developed by the consortium improves the safety of ships in the port areas.
The methods suggested in this document are based on an overview of the state-of-practice guidelines and state-of-the-art methods in safety risk analysis. They are compliant with the Guidelines for Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) and The Ship Inspection Report Programme (SIRE).
Other accounts on the same issues may exist that are either complementary or preferred over the methods described in this paper. This document is intended to make discussions constructive by possibly benchmarking other views with those described here and by working out a clear methodology and guidelines for conducting a safety risk analysis of the system being developed; and for informing decisions on the system’s acceptability or improvements needed to achieve the acceptability.
This paper describes the methodological aspects of calculation of incidence rates from incomplete data in occupational epidemiology. Proportionate measures in epidemiological studies are useful e.g. to describe the proportion of slips, trips and falls compared to other types of injury mechanisms within single age-strata. However, a comparison of proportions of slips, trips and falls among the different age-strata gives no meaning and can hamper the conclusions. Examples of a constructed example and some selected studies show how estimates of incidence rates can be calculated from the proportionate data by applying estimates of denominators available from other information. The calculated examples show how the risks based on the incidence rates in some cases differ from the risks based on the proportionate rates with the consequence of hampering the conclusions and the recommendations for prevention. In some cases the proportionate rates give good estimates of the incidence rates, but in other studies this might cause errors. It is recommended that estimates of the incidence rates should be used, where this is possible, by estimation of the size of the population. The paper is intended to be useful for students and teachers in epidemiology by using the attached Excel training file.
Background:
The metabolic syndrome (MS) represents a cluster of risk factors related to insulin resistance. Metabolic syndrome is a strong risk factor for chronic metabolic and cardiovascular diseases and is related to nutritional factors, sleep patterns, work-related stress, fatigue, and physical activity — all of which are critical issues at sea. We have previously demonstrated a MS prevalence of 24.2% in Danish seafarers. This study aimed to follow the trend of MS after 2 years’ intervention.
Materials and methods:
Out of 524 Danish seafarers (mean age 37.7 years) who underwent medical fit-for-duty examination by seamen’s doctors at baseline, 141 seafarers (mean age 41.3 years) were tracked and re-examined after 2 years. At baseline all participants received general advice regarding lifestyle issues. Seafarers with MS were additionally given specific advice regarding treatment. The seafarers provided questionnaire information about their workplace on board, about treatment of hyperlipidaemia, hypertension, and about previously diagnosed type 2-diabetes. In order to define MS, we collected data about waist circumference, blood pressure, triglycerides, HDL-cholesterol, and fasting plasma glucose.
Results:
Out of 35 (26.5%) seafarers who fulfilled the criteria for MS at follow-up, 18 had MS at baseline while 9 were incident cases. Two seafarers with MS at baseline ceased to qualify for this condition at follow-up. The prevalence of seafarers with MS at follow-up represents a minimal estimate because a proportion could not be assessed due to missing fasting blood tests. Smoking and alcohol consumption was not reduced.
Conclusions:
In spite of the intervention, the prevalence of MS increased in this group of seafarers. This study indicates the limitations of individual health promotion and the need for corporate actions.
This chapter is about emergent safety hazards in engineering systems. These
hazards are those that emerge from a system without arising from any part of the
system alone, but because of interactions between parts. We distinguish two
approaches to analysing engineering systems: one is to view them as sociotechnical, and the other is to consider them as cyber-physical systems. We
illustrate a great deal of emergent hazardous behaviours and phenomena due to
unknown accident physics, malign actions, chemistry, and biology and due to
deficiencies in managements and organisations. The method that follows the
socio-technical view consists in the representation of a system by sequential
functionally unrelated processes that can in reality influence the performance of each other via sneak paths. The method that follows the cyber-physical systems
view focuses on the analysis of control loops (feedback, feedforward, positive,
and negative) and, especially, interrelated loops. The chapter explores also the
realm of security threats due to malign actions that can trigger safety-threatening events. And finally it gives general guidance for avoiding and eliminating safety hazards when designing engineering systems.