Maritime Safety Management Strategy Based on Game Theory Analysis

The large demand for maritime transportation not only brings huge benefits, but also brings many problems and challenges, especially in maritime safety. Ship collisions, stranding, fire, oil pollution and other accidents cause huge damage to the society and shipping companies every year. Therefore, maritime safety management gradually becomes the common goal of coastal countries. However, maritime safety is a system engineering, which means each part should cooperate to ensure the safety. In this project, the authors focus on three major participants - Authorities, ship owners and ship safety management companies. Authorities will make scientific inspection policies to make ship owners obey the maritime rules and preserve the maritime safety consciously; ship owners will take measures to deal with PSC inspection and reduce the detention probability; ship safety management companies will reject the high-risk ship under New Inspection Regime (NIR) policy to ensure its fame. Bilateral games (complete information model) between every two of three participants were built and the Nash equilibrium solution to each game were found. Then a trilateral game among Authorities, ship owners and ship safety management companies is introduced. Based on the Nash equilibrium solutions, the authors can find the variation laws of optimal inspection rates. Meanwhile, several suggestions may also be put forward.