IALA Waterways Risk Assessment Program
Under the guidance and oversight of the International Association of Marine Aids to Navigation and Lighthouse Authorities (IALA) Risk Management Steering Group, significant progress has been achieved on the development of a risk assessment program to predict the frequency of collisions and groundings on a waterway. This risk assessment program, the IALA Waterways Risk Assessment Program (IWRAP), provides the user with a tool that assists in quantifying the risks involved with vessel traffic in specific geographical areas. On the basis of a specified traffic intensity and composition, the tool allows the user to efficiently evaluate and estimate the annual number of collisions and groundings in the specified navigational area. In order to properly quantify the grounding and collision risks, rational criteria for prediction and evaluation of grounding and collision accidents have to be developed and the inherent consequences should to be analyzed and assessed.
The main benefit of the formulated procedure is that it allows comparisons of various navigational route layouts by assessing the relative frequencies of collisions and groundings. It should be noted that IWRAP only addresses collision and grounding frequencies, it does not support any analysis of the consequences of these groundings and/or collisions.