Hazard and Risk Assessment of Unmanned Dry Bulk Carriers on the High Seas

Seafaring has a centuries-old tradition. Maritime trade started long before the existence of freight airplanes, covering large distances and thereby enabling the exchange of goods between distant parts of the world. Today, the ship still is the most economic means to transport cargo between the continents. For on-board personnel, merchant ship voyages are long and straining, with a lot of time spent miles apart from family and friends. It is for this reason, amongst several others, that the MUNIN project has been launched. MUNIN means Maritime Unmanned Navigation through Intelligence in Networks and is a research project funded by the European Union. The project is a collaboration of universities, research institutes and industry partners in five different countries and seeks to establish a framework for unmanned, autonomous freight shipping. One of the project partners is the Fraunhofer Center for Maritime Logistics and Services CML based in Hamburg, Germany, where this thesis was written. Within the scope of the MUNIN project, the thesis at hand aims at assessing the risks associated with unmanned maritime transport with the help of fault tree analysis. Chapter 2 provides a brief look at other unmanned and autonomous transport systems and compares them to unmanned ships. Chapter 2 outlines the MUNIN project and gives details on the vessel, on-board systems and the operational modes that will be relevant for the following risk analysis. In order to carry out the latter, techniques for hazard identification and risk assessment need to be applied. An overview of typically used methods is given in chapter 4. After choosing a focus for the risk assessment in chapter 5 and the identification of hazards in chapter 6, accident scenarios are developed using event trees and fault trees in chapter 7. Their qualitative assessment is followed by a quantitative assessment in chapter 8. Chapter 9 deals with the estimation of accident consequences, which is the basis for obtaining the final results of the risk assessment in chapter 10. It also includes a critical reflection on the analysis, its results and a conclusion.