Human Error in Maritime Operations: Analyses of Accident Reports Using the Leximancer Tool

This paper focuses on the problem of lack of Situation Awareness (SA) by mariners. An analysis of a large number of accident reports was conducted in order to determine the extent to which SA is a relevant issue in merchant shipping operations. For the first time use was made of the Leximancer tool due to its ability to rapidly analyse large amounts of textual information. One major function of this research was to examine the accuracy and usefulness of such a data analysis tool by comparing the results of this computer analysis with that of a ‘manual’ analysis (performed by two raters). Our results underline the importance of SA in decision-making processes in the maritime domain: a large number of investigated maritime accidents were partly due to loss of SA. Also, the results of the Leximancer tool were found to be comparable to the manual analysis, thus suggesting further use of such a system for accident report analysis in other transportation domains.