From Accident Records to Safety Decisions: An Artificial Neural Network for Integrated Maritime Risk Assessment

Abstract

Maritime accident analysis increasingly uses machine learning to support safety management, but many existing studies focus on single-output prediction, such as accident-occurrence probability, severity class, near-miss frequency, or one specific consequence. This study proposes a data-driven decision-support framework based on a Multi-Input Multi-Output Artificial Neural Network (MIMO-ANN) for the simultaneous prediction of multiple maritime accident consequences. A dataset of 582 recorded accident cases is constructed by integrating SafePASS project records with consequence, severity, and structural-damage information from the literature. The dataset includes 15 input variables covering ship characteristics, operational context, environmental conditions, accident type, and geographical zone and 15 consequence outputs covering structural damage, casualties, emergency-response indicators, total loss, and secondary consequence/escalation mechanisms. The ANN is trained using the Scaled Conjugate Gradient (SCG) algorithm and evaluated under different network configurations and data-partitioning strategies. The best-performing model uses 30 hidden neurons with a 60/20/20 split, achieving a correlation coefficient (R) equal to 0.9249 and a mean squared error (MSE) equal to 0.0240 for testing, and a R equal to 0.9278 and a MSE equal to 0.0231 for validation. Ten-fold cross-validation further confirms internal predictive stability, with mean testing R equal to 0.8803 ± 0.0827 and MSE equal to 0.0445 ± 0.0478. Permutation-based sensitivity analysis shows that accident type, zone, flag, natural light, environment, and visibility are key drivers of predicted consequences, whereas vessel-specific parameters have a secondary, context-dependent influence. The framework should be interpreted as predicting the relative likelihood, severity, or magnitude of accident consequences in recorded or scenario-defined accident cases, not the probability of accident occurrence. Future work should address dataset imbalance, include near-miss and nonserious records, incorporate richer AIS and metocean data, integrate exposure data, and validate the framework using independent accident datasets.