The Impact of Vessel Speed and Traffic Organization on Safety in a One-Way Waterway with Multi-Junctions

To meet the diverse and increasing demand, a comprehensive port usually contains multiple harbor basins and a waterway with multi-junction. This kind of waterway is usually an accident-prone area due to the complicated ship traffic organization in intersections. The traditional traffic organization in a waterway relies on artificial scheduling such as pilots and VTS centers. Few theoretical researches on ship traffic organization that consider safety in intersections have been found. In this context, this paper establishes a navigation simulation model for a port with multi-junction waterways to simulate the whole complex process of ships. The impact of ship speed on navigation safety under different numbers of arriving ships is studied, as various speeds may lead to the different probabilities of collision. The conclusion shows that when the number of ships arriving is different, the influence of different speeds on the traffic organization of the waterway is different, and the conflict rate also has different trends. Our research method can provide a way for the port dispatching department to find out the best ship speed to reach the waterway’s greatest potential considering navigation safety.