Defence of dissertation in the field of marine technology, maritime risk and safety, Arsham Mazaheri, M.Sc., MBA

Utilizing embedded knowledge in maritime transportation system to manage the risk of ship grounding.

The public examination of the doctoral dissertation of Arsham Mazaheri, M.Sc., MBA), will be held on 11 August 2017 at 12.00 at the Aalto University School of Engineering. The title of the dissertation is A framework for evidence-based risk modeling of ship grounding. Field of the dissertation is marine technology, maritime risk and safety.

Ship grounding accident is one of the most severe threats to the maritime transportation, and thus to the global trade, since more than 80% of the global trade is done through sea transportation. Therefore, it is not surprising that outstanding number of research are conducted so far to model this type of maritime accident and reveal its mechanism. However, questions such as “to which degree such models are helpful for decision and policy makers to mitigate the associated risk”, or “how trustworthy are the results of such models” are still and will always be valid questions.   

This thesis is an attempt to shed some lights for such questions. In the first section of the thesis, a framework is proposed to model ship grounding accident using only the evidence in hand. The framework not only encourages to use primary (i.e. raw data and information with no secondary interpretation) and secondary (i.e. information and knowledge that have some level of secondary interpretation) source of evidence for constructing a risk model, but also proposes a method to clearly visualize the uncertainty level of each module of the constructed model. This way, the users of such model can use the results of each module of the model only if the uncertainty of that module is acceptable for them. In the second section, a model is constructed based on the proposed framework and by utilizing the embedded knowledge in ship grounding incident and accident reports as well as the expertise of sea-pilots. The aim of the constructed model and the provided uncertainty map of the model is to help the decision makers to find the riskiest scenarios for a ship grounding accident, and decide on the possible risk control measures to be in placed in order to mitigate the associated risk.

Opponent: Associate Professor Marcelo Ramos Martins, University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil

Supervisor: Professor Pentti Kujala, Aalto University School of Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Electronic dissertation: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-60-7478-8

Contact information: Arsham Mazaheri, arsham.mazaheri@aalto.fi