Robust Evaluation of Risks in Ship-to-Ship Transfer Operations: Application of the STOCHASTIC UTA Multicriteria Decision Support Method

Decision making in the maritime environment is a complex and difficult task. The stochastic nature of maritime operations, in combination with the complicated and often hostile sea setting, composes a scene where obvious solutions are not always the best choice. The assessment and evaluation of risks often lays on the exploitation of the experts’ knowledge. However, this approach may suffer from uncertainty, stemming from potential biases inherent to the opinions of the experts. The aim of this chapter is to evaluate the risks of a ship-to-ship transfer of cargo operations, proposing a challenging approach to address the aforementioned uncertainty, by utilizing a sophisticated and targeted multi-criteria decision aid (MCDA) framework. The STOCHASTIC Utility Additives (UTA) method, adopting the philosophy of aggregation–disaggregation, is applied, coupled with a robustness control procedure. This methodological framework helped in the examination, management and reduction of uncertainty, and in the eventual attainment of robust and reliable evaluation results.