According to a study, vessel grounding accidents can potentially cause catastrophic marine accidents with environmental pollution and loss of life and economy.
In particular, the study titled “The Role of the ECDIS on the Development of Situational Awareness”, published by TransNav, informs that today the electronic chart display and information systems (ECDIS) is the main cartographic system and must therefore be an appropriate aid to support seafarers in building situational awareness with the relevant information needed for safe navigation.
Achieving and maintaining situational awareness on the highest level is a challenging process affected by the individual, task, systemic factors, and environment. The difficulty occurs in the interaction between the characteristics of the human information processing abilities of operators and technologiesʹ design. Author Endsley labelled these difficulties as ʺSA Demonsʺ.
This study, shows at which situation awareness level those errors occurred and which SA demon affected the seafarers to perform an error.
According to the authors, the results of the study are divided into two parts. The first part consists of an analysis of errors committed by OOWs operating the ECDIS. Analysing those errors, they are assigned to a certain SA level.
The aim of the study was to determine at which SA level development of good situational awareness ceases and which error OOW made, that affected the loss of SA. The second part consists of an analysis of SA demons that have affected OOWs. Analysing the circumstances in which the error occurred, an SA demon, which affected the OOW to make the error, was identified for each case.
To find out on which SA Level, development of Situation Awareness ceases, accident reports were analysed. In every case, several factors that caused the accident were identified. In this study, only ECDIS SA demons are certain difficulties that represent an obstacle in the interaction between the operatorsʹ cognitive abilities and designs of the technologies. Analysing accident reports, several SA demons were recognized, affected the grounding accident.
Findings
Analysing 25 grounding accident cases, it was found that in 22 cases the development of SA suspends at SA Level 1. SA Level 1 presents the perception of the environment. When developing situational awareness, at SA Level 1, seafarers collect the relevant information required for safe navigation. With inaccurate information, or without any information at all, seafarers cannot develop higher levels of SA.
With the loss of situational awareness, they cannot know what is happening with the vessel, and therefore cannot project future vessel movement and environmental conditions.
With 88% cases in which situational awareness is ceased at SA Level 1, there is a need to find what went wrong and found some significant cause. Two most occurring causative factors, at SA Level 1 are related to ECDIS alarms. Together, they present 73% of causative factors at SA Level 1 and 64% of all causative factors at which the development of Situation Awareness ceased.
The third most occurred causative factor, also related to ECDIS alarms, refers to SA Level 2. Together with causative factors at SA Level 1, causative factors related to ECDIS alarms present 73% of all causative factors.
