Analysis of Lookout Activity in a Simulated Environment to Investigate Maritime Accidents Caused by Human Error
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Congrats to a very interesting piece of scientific work. Your aim is very ambitious and there is still a long way to go. As you mentioned yourself, there are quite a number of further factors to be taken into account.
Your work provides first basic input as a kind of a pilot study.
The scientific approach is very well sound and I appreciate the thorough methodological approach, which however, will need further adaptions and modifications. However, I would like to encourage you to continue with your work! I am not convinced myself, whether your ambitious aim once can really be achieved as I have some doubts that even you may detect and classify the activities of a lookout you can derive if it is a "positive" or negative lookout. Moreover, I see some big challenges in finding the patterns in real accidents. In other words, I am looking forward to read more from your future research!
So far, some of your statements regarding the outcome and conclusions from the results seem a bit too optimistic, but I can accept this if you state this as first preliminary outcomes/results of a pilot study.
The way you conduct and present your work very much complies with the requirements of scientific writing and publishing.
In terms of potentials for improvement, I would like to recommend more survey of literature and erticles. Even though your research is very original and unique, there is surely research that is similar to yours. There are numerous European research projects that delivered interesting simulation-based studies related to your work!
To name a few, for instance, there are numerous simulation based experimental studies looking into behaviors and searching for patterns of navigators using eye-tracking to learn, how navigators collect their information:
Lützhöft, M., Dukic, T. (2007). Show me where you look and I’ll tell you if you’re safe: Eye tracking of maritime watch-keepers. Paper presented at the 39th Nordic Ergonomics Society Conference. October 1-3, Lysekil, Sweden.
Bjørneseth, F. B., Renganayagalu, S. K., Dunlop, M. D., Homecker, E., & Komandur, S. (2012). Towards an experimental design framework for evaluation of dynamic workload and situational awareness in safety critical maritime settings. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual BCS Interaction Specialist Group Conference on People and Computers (pp. 309-314). British Computer Society.
DiNocera, F & Mastrangelo, Simon & Baldauf, Michael & Steinhage, Axel & Kataria, Aditi & Proietta, S. (2016). Mental workload assessment using eye-tracking glasses in a simulated maritime scenario. In: Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Europe Chapter 2015 Annual Conference, pp.235 -248)
On the other hand it could be useful for improvement of your paper to give a wider justification in the overall ongoing developments in the maritime field (e-navigation and MASS) and also refer to work that addresses a reduction of human errors, like e.g.:
Baldauf, M. & Hong, Sun-Bae. (2016). Improving and Assessing the Impact of e-Navigation applications. International Journal of e-Navigation and Maritime Economy. 4. 1-12. 10.1016/j.enavi.2016.06.001.
I wish you good luck and much of success for your further work.
Kind regards
Author Response
I deeply appreciate your encouragement on the submitted manuscript.
First of all, we have modified and appended more literature survey in the simulated environment based on your suggestion.
Moreover, as you fundamentally pointed, we will utilize the current research methodology and system to move forward. In order for that, we also have seriously recognized and considered how we can develop scientific hypotheses in the next phase of the research. Currently, we are working on establishing navigator's behavior related to hypotheses affecting the maritime accident. I do hope to share the future research outcomes with you and get your sincere criticism and comments.
Sincerely,
Ik-Hyun Youn
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
I admire the authors for their interesting and novel study of the navigators' behavioral pattern anticipation and its effect on reducing the maritime accidents. I believe if this manuscript is published as it is, the methods and the results can be very useful to the researchers in the field.
Author Response
I deeply appreciate your encouragement on the submitted manuscript.
As future work based on the existing outcomes, we will apply the developed research methodology and system to the hypothesis development phase. Currently, we are working on establishing navigator's behavior related to hypotheses affecting the maritime accident. I do hope to share the future research outcomes with you and get your sincere criticism and comments.
Sincerely,
Ik-Hyun Youn
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
