MIMIC – Minimizing risks of maritime oil transport by holistic safety strategies

MIMIC project studies, from the multidisciplinary perspective, the risks related to the maritime oil transport in the Baltic Sea, especially in the Gulf of Finland. The main task of FEM group in this project is to develop an integrative risk and decision analysis model, based on the Bayesian networks. This meta-model will gather information and forecasts concerning the maritime traffic, oil transport, oil combating and realized as well as potentially upcoming oil accidents, not forgetting their likely environmental consequences. We will utilize statistics, models and expert interviews that are partly produced in the earlier projects of the multidisciplinary MIMIC project consortium and partly within this project. In the end, analysis of safety management policy produced during the project, will be linked to the risk assessment model. This will allow us to probabilistically calculate the action combinations that would be most cost-effective and robust to the prevailing uncertainty in the system, what comes to the minimization of risks against the environment and the players of different levels. The model will also give answers on how different risk approaches are affecting the ranking order of the management actions. For future planning of the research, the model will produce useful information on the information value of different variables, thus telling us where the additional knowledge would most increase the reliability of the analysis.