A Study on Minimum Number of Ship-handling Simulation Required for Evaluating Vessel's Proximity Measure

The Korean government has introduced and enforced maritime traffic safety assessment to secure traffic safety since 2010. The maritime traffic safety assessment is needed by law to design a new port or modify an existing one. According to Korea Maritime Safety Act, in the assessment the propriety of marine traffic system consists of the safety of channel transit and berthing/unberthing maneuver, safety of mooring, and safety of marine traffic flow. The safety of channel transit and berthing/unberthing maneuver can be evaluated only by ship-handling simulation. The ship-handling simulation is carried out by sea pilots working with the port concerned. The vessel's proximity measure is an important factor to evaluate traffic safety. The proximity measure is composed of vessel's closest distance to channel boundary and probability of grounding/collision. What is more, the probability of grounding becomes important. According to central limit theorem, a sample has a normal distribution on condition that its size is more than 30. However, more than 30 simulation runs bring about the increase of assessment period and difficulty of employing sea pilots. Therefore this paper is to find out minimum sample size for evaluating vessel's proximity. First sample sets of size of 3, 5, 7, 9 etc. are selected randomly on the basis of normal distribution. And then KS test for goodness of fit and t-test for confidence interval are applied to each sample set. Finally this paper decides the minimum sample size. As a result this paper suggests the minimum sample size of 5, that is, the simulation of more than five times.