The Entrants’ View on Collision Avoidance

Abstract

Collisions are a serious threat to ship’s safety and despite the existence of codified rules and obligatory COLREG course for the seafarers, the number of maritime accidents is still great. Noticing this we have decided to use group model building to extract the knowledge about the process of collision avoidance from our group of experts. As a result, we obtained 18 factors which we have divided into 4 categories in order of importance. After reviewing the results we have noticed that the experts focused on superficial and theoretical aspects of collision avoidance. Therefore we have concluded that their knowledge despite our initial assumptions was insufficient to thoroughly revise this topic. However, we have also recognized some patterns that would suggest that the current rules could be improved. Our goal is to cause a discussion that will, hopefully, result in changes in education, laws, or both.

Keywords

• maritime navigation
• collisions
• collision avoidance
• knowledge elicitation methods