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Description (Page 1):

Principle Investigator: J. Rene van Dorp (GWU)
Principle Investigator: Jason Merrick (VCU)
Timeline: Start Date: 8-15-2002, End Date: 8-15-2004.
Sponsor: National Science Foundation
Funding: GWU Award SES-0213700 - $139,305
              VCU Award SES-0213627 - $136,479

Over the past 6 years the principal investigators at GWU and VCU have co-developed with Thomas A. Mazzuchi, Jack Harrald and Martha Grabowski a methodology for assessing the risk associated with maritime transportation. The methodology utilizes dynamic simulation of the maritime transportation system, expert judgment elicitation models and probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) techniques. The approach has proven useful in three major maritime ports in the United States i.e. Port of New Orleans (Mississippi River in Louisiana), Port Valdez (Prince William Sound in Alaska) and Port Seattle (Puget Sound in Washington State). Two of these studies focused on passenger safety, while the other focused on oil transportation risk. The National Research Council in 1998 assessed the methodology and concluded that representation of uncertainty in the maritime risk assessment method is lacking. "The Prince William Sound Risk Assessment is an important step forward in using probabilistic risk assessment methods to assess the safety of transporting oil in large tankers in PWS. Because the data were very limited, the analysis results and the resulting conclusions are not robust and are necessarily uncertain [National Research Council, 1998]."