Ship-handling simulation system has been used for maritime traffic safety assessment for harbor and fairway. There exist various environmental conditions under which ship may navigate along a fairway or in harbor. Due to the time and budget limitations, however, ship-handling simulations are usually carried out for very limited number of environmental conditions. In this paper, statistical method for effective and systematic determination of real time simulation conditions is suggested and applied to the maritime traffic safety assessment problems. In the empirical study, the principal component analysis method and the concept of empirical cumulative distribution function are suggested to estimate synthetic navigational difficulty and to select simulation conditions which would impose high difficulty on shiphandling.