Simulating prevention operations at sea against maritime piracy

Maritime piracy has been a major issue for the international community in the last decade and affected the global economy. As a reaction to this issue, international organizations have deployed naval forces to protect maritime transportation in the affected regions. In this study, we present a simulation‐based analysis tool to evaluate the effectiveness of operations to prevent piracy. In our model, we consider three stakeholders’ views (pirates, maritime transporters, and naval forces) and modelled their behaviours separately, using Discrete Event Simulation (DES) and Agent‐Based Simulation (ABS) approaches. Our hybrid DES and ABS model is used to simulate hypothetical scenarios on the Gulf of Aden for understanding the cause and effect relationship between naval resource allocation and piracy prevention. Our experimental results showed that, first, helicopters are most valuable in prevention and, second, either patrolling or escorting naval ships must carry a helicopter for effective prevention.