A methodology for rating and ranking hazards in maritime formal safety assessment using fuzzy logic

Formal safety assessment of ships has attracted great attention over the last few years. This paper, following a brief review of the current status of marine safety assessment is focused on the hazards identification (HAZID) and prioritisation process. A multicriteria decision making framework, which is based on experts‟ estimation, is then proposed for hazards evaluation. Additionally in this paper many aspects of the evaluation framework are presented including the synthesis of evaluation teams, the assessment of the importance of criteria, the evaluation of the consequences of the alternative hazards and the final ranking of the hazards. The proposed methodology has the innovative feature of embodying techniques of fuzzy logic theory into the classical multicriteria decision analysis. The paper concludes by exploring the potentiality of the above methodology in providing a robust and flexible evaluation framework suitable to the characteristics of a hazard evaluation problem.