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

Abstract 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.