Identification of the Most Important Events to the Occurrence of a Disaster Using Maritime Examples

Previous studies on maritime disasters have noted the importance of searching for their causal factors in the analysis of different types of vessels and various regions where accidents have occurred. The main objective of the study that this article presents was to develop a new approach to modelling and causal analysis of the course of maritime disasters in order to provide a holistic evaluation of this phenomenon. The novel approach adopted to support the thesis combined event network analysis and fault tree analysis (used in functional analysis for modelling the structures of systems) in the process analysis. The authors advanced a thesis that, in the studied population of disasters, there were dominant classes of basic events in each phase of the process during the course of a disaster (distinguished by means of an event network). Thirty maritime disasters that occurred between 1912 and 2019 were selected for quantitative and qualitative analyses. In each disaster, the different phases of its course were distinguished: latent, initiating, escalating, critical, and energy release. A total of 608 basic events were identified in the population, enabling the identification and characterisation of 44 classes of events. The importance of the events in each of the phases was calculated by means of importance measures. The findings confirmed the thesis. At the same time, an analysis of the importance of basic events in each phase revealed that the most common basic events are not always the most important.