Probability of active navigational failures: incident analyses for use in ship-bridge allision risk assessments

Journal article, 2025

This paper studies the probability of active navigational error events for use in ship-bridge allision risk analysis. To estimate the probability of these kinds of events, accident databases, incident reports and AIS data were studied; the case studies herein cover 6 years and 15 bridges in Scandinavia. The main findings of this paper show that there is great variation in the probability of ship-bridge allision due to active navigational errors, and it is not recommended to use the currently common practice of 2% uniform distribution of the number of ship passages on all bridges. Another important finding is that the probability of a ship striking a bridge due to the error type Wrong Course at a Turning point is not uniform along the length of the bridge, but is only likely to occur in a cone formation from the last turning point.