A Study on the Construction of Safety Management Evaluation System for Shipping Company

Seaborne transportation is expanding in accordance with the growth of the global economy and the increase of international trade between countries. Recently, as a result of FTAs (free trade agreements) between countries, worldwide cargo volume by ship is expected to keep on rising due to the unification of economic zones. Such an increase in maritime transportation leads to maritime traffic, and this poses a greater risk of marine accidents in a country’s coastal water. Moreover, such risk factors that are threatening the safety of ships’ navigation such as embarkation of multinational seafarer, piracy, changes in maritime climate by global warming and the like are in occurrence. What’s more, the mounting traffic of yacht and pleasure boats in littoral sea as a result of the increase in maritime leisure activities triggers higher possibilities of marine accidents. To cope with such changes in the maritime environment, it requires higher safety management skills from shipping companies, the main subject in charge of the safety matters. However, shipping companies tend to acknowledge safety just as a form of cost without profitability. They particularly have more tendencies to be inactive in managing ship safety and investment during a dull shipping season. Therefore, in this paper, the authors propose SMES (Safety Management Evaluation System) for the measurement of safety management levels on Korean shipping companies. The authors have drawn conclusions with an actual proof analysis in the paper. First of all, they established a concept for evaluating safety management of shipping companies, and classified shipping companies and their ships for evaluation. Second of all, the authors selected items for evaluating through a questionnaire survey analysis to experts and built a database. Thirdly, they developed SSMEI (Ship Safety Management Evaluation Index) for an objective evaluation process and calculated weighted value members for each evaluation item. Lastly, the authors evaluated the safety management level of Korean shipping companies using the constructed database and SSMEI.