Operational limits for aquaculture operations from a risk and safety perspective

Abstract

Current decision making regarding whether to abort a high-risk aquaculture operation in a Norwegian fish farm is mainly experience-driven. The on-site personnel decides whether to start/delay/abort operations primarily based on their subjective judgement about whether they can handle the situation. The risk is considered implicitly as “gut feelings”. There are no explicit operational limits nor a structured process to derive these for high-risk operations. In this research, a predefine safety-critical attributes have been identified from major accident scenarios to guide machine learning process to define operational limits based on multi-source data. Bayesian network, Tree Augmented Naïve Bayes (TAN) search algorithms were selected to build up prediction model so that operational limits upon a given condition can be decided. The paper concludes that machine learning techniques have great potential to be used to support safe decision-making in high-risk aquaculture operation, and the risk-based operational limits facilitates better understanding of operational context, and comprehension of the meaning of several deviations which may indicate a dangerous situation.