History of IWRAP

The IALA Working Group on Risk Management was tasked with reviewing existing risk assessment models used by IALA members together with major traffic studies carried out be members and develop a generic port and waterway risk assessment model capable of being adapted for use in any specific port or waterway. Several risk assessment models and traffic studies were considered during the first two meetings of the Working Group.

At the third meeting held in Halifax, Canada in January 2002 the Canadian representatives demonstrated their “Minimum Safe Distance” (MSD) tool. The MSD tool determines the minimum safe channel width based on; types and sizes of vessels, aids to navigation provided, and the geophysical conditions within the channel. The Working Group agreed that although modifications and additions would be needed to the model, the use of MSD would probably be the most effective and economic means of developing a generic model.

The major missing elements were probability of grounding, and the probability of collision and the Canadian representatives were requested to update the MSD to include the missing elements.

A very simple interface was subsequently developed that contained only a limited amount of the needed functionality. Its purpose was to demonstrate the complexity of the mathematics involved with this process. The Working Group consequently approved this approach and Canada was invited to further develop the interface. Given the enhanced goals, the international nature of the program and Working Group the name was changed to IWRAP.

Further development was carried out and IWRAP Mk I v1 was presented to the Working Group at its sixth meeting in January 2004. Prior to the meeting, IWRAP Mk I had been tested on the Straights of Bosporus, Tampa Bay, and parts of the St. Lawrence River. Although the outputs from these tests were higher than actual historical data showed, it was believed that one reason for this had to do with the need to capture the human element.

During the sixth meeting pre-scaling factors were determined to consider the effect of the four generic levels of VTS, and the value that Pilots bring to shipping based on their enhanced local knowledge of the areas that they transit. These factors were applied to the potential number of meetings per year, thus creating a much tighter correlation between the theoretical and historical numbers. The theoretical numbers generated by IWRAP Mk I were still high when compared to actual data.

In April 2006, the IALA Council approved the IALA Risk Management Tool encompassing both IWRAP Mk I and PAWSA. In July 2006, IALA informed IMO that both PAWSA and IWRAP were available for use by its membership.

PAWSA has been successfully applied many times since, particularly by the USCG. When IWRAP was initially tested, the results obtained were credible and in accordance with the accident statistics in the considered area and experts were satisfied with the results. However, at a later stage, when IWRAP was applied to other areas, it yielded erroneous results indicating an unrealistic high number of collisions and groundings.

The IALA steering group endeavored to analyze and understand the underlying cause for these errors, but was unable to obtain sufficient transparency on the coding of the underlying mathematical algorithms. It was therefore unable to rectify the problem in the short term.

In 2007, IALA was in an extremely awkward position, and had to advise its members and IMO that, although PAWSA continued to be a quite valuable tool for risk assessment, IWRAP was producing unsatisfactory results. Therefore, it became imperative that a new operational version was offered to its members and to IMO.

The steering group decided to initiate the development of a second generation of IWRAP. Thanks to the dedicated efforts of a team of IALA members, research institutes and universities, lead by Omar Frits Eriksson from DAMSA, a new quantitative tool, named IWRAP MK II, was developed and validated. It is based on the BaSSy ToolBox (GRISK). BaSSy is a research project funded by a number of maritime stakeholders around the Baltic Sea.

IWRAP MK II provides the user with a tool that assist in quantifying the risks involved with vessel traffic in specific geographical areas. On the basis of a specific route layout, waterway attributes, specified traffic intensity and composition, the tool allows the user to efficiently evaluate and estimate the annual number (frequency) of collisions and groundings along the route. IWRAP MK II is capable of taking into account the risk reduction effect of Aids to Navigation, however this has not yet been automated, since there still is a lot of work to be done on quantifying the risk reduction effect of different types of Aids to Navigation.

The validation of the software was done in October and November 2008 and reported satisfactory. For the areas tested, the results obtained were found to be close to the historical evidence data at hand.

The first training seminar dedicated to IWRAP was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in April 2009. The Malacca Strait was used as a case for demonstration purposes.