Human Factors implication in innovative strategies for containership fires prevention and management
Authors: Sangermano Vittorio , Ciaburri Mario , Russo Raffaella , Palma Esposito Daniele 
Published: June 2024

Maritime transport historically represented the centre of global trade with about 90% of the goods’ volumes and values worldwide. Nowadays, containerships are built with the same basic design principles as the older smaller container ships, without accounting for possible consequences that could impact safety. In this perspective, cargo fire represents one of the most important threats for ships. On one hand, fire causes large losses of humans and/or cargoes, on the other hand fire is impacting coastal zone and marine protected areas causing unvaluable damages to the flora and fauna. Often, seafarers underestimate the dangerousness of the situation. This because, sometimes people are not always well trained and some confusion on the correct procedures to be adopted might lead to in a catastrophic situation. In this perspective, the European Union funded a research project based on innovative strategies for containership fires prevention and management. the European research goal is to prevent, detect, manage and response to fire accidents on board of containerships paving special attention to seafarer Safety Culture (SC) to better understand how seaman people perceive safety onboard and the company’s approach to safety management. Human Factors (HF) and Safety experts will closely work by setting a SC assessment framework which allows actors to identify, describe and structure their SC using a four-stage model of cognition. In particular, step 1 focuses on theoretical framework development. Step 2 focuses in identifying the overt parts of a safety system before focussing on the hidden layers of the system. In step 3 the hidden layers of the safety system will be scrutinised using exploratory systems constellations. Finally, step 4 encompassed the replication in other use cases. Furthermore, the research activity will develop a Digital Solution (DS) that will increase the overall situational awareness of accountable people to promptly react during fire accidents avoiding cascade effects. A novel training for seamen on fire management, based on the results of the project, will be executed to increase the readiness of first responders. Hence, the research activity proposes a truly new generation of digital fire management solutions to increase the safety and the SC of seafarers. The impact of the proposed solution will be initially evaluated by performing validation activities in simulated environment by utilising ad-hoc facilities in Italy and France respectively at Italian Maritime Academy Technologies (IMAT) centre and École nationale supérieure maritime (ENSM) centre. Afterwards, demonstration activities will be executed in a real environment where the HF and safety will closely work on the field with the involved actors to gather as much results as possible. Finally, in order to provide evidences of HF and safety results, the research activity selected five scenarios in different European countries: Genova port (Italy), Brest port (France), Valencia port (Spain), Bremen port (Germany) and Gdynia port (Poland).