STRATEGIC-PLANNING OF VESSEL TRAFFIC SERVICES USING ABC ANALYSIS AND OPTIMIZATION

Vessel Traffic Services (VTS) advise vessels navigating the waterways. VTS communications provide to the mariner timely, pertinent, and accu rate information that would assist in safe manoeuvring of the vessel. Following several oil spills in 1989, Congress passed The Oil Pollutio n Act of 1990 (Public Law 101-380). The Act requires the ''Secretary t o conduct a study...to determine and prioritize the US ports and chann els that are in need of new, expanded, or improved vessel traffic serv ice systems....'' As required by the Act, the US Coast Guard analysed historical vessel casualties and their consequences and projected futu re vessel casualties and consequences for 23 study zones. The study us es a benefit-cost approach. VTS benefits are defined as the avoided ve ssel casualties and the associated consequences. The avoided consequen ces are measured in physical units and are assigned monetary values. v is costs are defined as the initial federal investment for a state-of- the-art VTS system in each study zone and its annual operating and mai ntenance costs. Both the benefits and costs are expressed in the 1993 Net Present Value of annual stream over the life cycle at 10 percent b asic annual rate. The study recommends VTS design by rank-ordering the zones by net benefit. In this paper, we use alternative methodologies for offering better assistance in making VTS design decision-making. First, we perform Ase analysis on the zones; that is, we classify them into three groups: The A group deserves a state-of-the-art, full-fled ged VTS presence, the B group could use an intermediate level of VTS s ervices, and the C group deserves an elementary level of VTS Services, as and if the budget permits. This analysis assumes that VTS services can resource allocation analysis; that is, for a given budget and giv en criterion (e.g. maximize the total benefit), select the optimal zon es in which the VTS services should be offered. This analysis, done fo r various levels of budget, would form a useful decision aid for the V TS design.