ABSTRACT
Accident and incident reports are useful for uncovering the factors that have contributed to the occurrence of a mishap as well as the level of importance of each factor. Besides, the way that the contributing factors are linked together may be understood from such reports. In this regard, the aim of this paper is to study the usability of the accident and incident reports for evidence-based modeling by assessing the type of knowledge that one can extract from these reports. As Lundberg et al. (2009) highlighted, in practice the result of an accident analysis depends on two issues namely the causes and the causality. The causes are the contributing factors that their presence in the accident is observed, and the causality is related
1 INTRODUCTION
Risk managers should usually use risk models to understand the behavior of a system and its components in order to mitigate the involved risks by implementing proper control measures (IMO, 2002). In this regard, a suitable model for risk management purposes should reflect the available background knowledge on the system and its components (Aven, 2013, Montewka et al., 2014). Currently available risk models for maritime risk analysis are not proper enough for risk management purposes as they are mostly based on the intuition of the developers rather than the evidence; thus they may not necessarily presenting the true available knowledge of the system. For the review of the risk models of ship grounding, the reader is referred to (Mazaheri et al., 2013b). The lack of knowledge about the underlying causes of accidents leads to the evidential uncertainty of any model attempting to describe this type of accident, (Aven and Zio, 2011). To decrease this uncertainty, evidence-based modeling that addresses real accident scenarios is encouraged, as opposed to development of imaginary scenarios, (e.g. Kristiansen, 2010, IMO, 2012).
