Approach
The underlying philosophy of the SAFER EURORO TN, "Design for Safety" is innovative and consequentially, all RTD projects instigated and co-ordinated by this TN have in common a high degree of innovation, most at the for-front of international developments. The need to adopt "total" approaches to improving safety is now appreciated by all concerned. It was in fact the understanding that safety is a global concept and fragmented attempts to tackling it tend to produce biased, incomplete and ineffective solutions that led to the development of new approaches to safety as outlined above. In the quest for improvement of ship safety, the largest single factor contributing to the unsatisfactory state of affairs, as regards ship safety, is the compulsion to focus all effort towards rule development. The link, transfer and translation of rules-based knowledge into safer ship designs are subject to an undirected/haphazard process shaped by the ingenuity of ship designers. This problem is further compounded by the fact that the norm for rule development, that is codifying good practice, becomes progressively impractical as evolutionary changes now happen faster than experience is gained, thus increasing the inherent potential for disasters. To overcome the deficiencies outlined in the foregoing, the TN supports the development of a formalised "Design for Safety" methodology, by adopting an integrative and holistic approach that links safety performance prediction through the utilisation of appropriate technological "tools" and innovation, risk assessment deriving from risk-based methodologies and design.