TN Summary
Responding to recent well-publicised marine disasters, the marine industry strives to shape safety through concerted efforts on an international scale. The progress is slow amidst burdens of inertia, tradition, conventions, interventions, old rules, new rules, biased attitudes, fierce competition and painfully low margins. But it points in the right direction! It is hoped that maintaining or improving ship safety at the rightful level requires more than disaster-triggered reactions and prescriptive regulations. It requires the systematic use of scientific method in all its forms together with a change in people's attitude to safety as well as willingness from the establishment to sustain both. In the past, the ability and understanding to respond to these needs were lacking. Today, scientific and technological breakthroughs offer unique opportunities to make a difference in improving ship safety.
The strategic aim of SAFER EURORO is to integrate safety cost-effectively within the design process in a way that safety "drives" ship design. The scope of the TN is to provide the necessary motivation and stimulation towards the development of a formal state-of-the-art design methodology to support and nurture a safety culture paradigm in the ship design process by treating safety as a design objective rather than a constraint.
The underlying theme is that safety assessment will enable safe-ship-designing to be formalised as a process within an iterative procedure that allows a two-way dynamic link between tools and design, where design constraints are defined or filtered by the process of safety assessment and indeed assurance.
The
procedure, on the one hand, gathers and assimilates technical information,
prioritises safety issues, identifies practical and cost-effective safeguards
and sets requirements and constraints for the design process. On the other
hand, it provides feedback from the design process to stimulate validation
and refinement of the tools, in the light of the experience gained from
simulation, implementation, and/or practical applications.
"To effectively co-ordinate RTD activity aiming to ensure the realisation of a formalised "Design for Safety" methodology for routine application in the shipyards, by utilising advanced design techniques to integrate and exploit the development of relevant critical technologies and risk-based frameworks, and to demonstrate the practical applicability and potential of the proposed methodology in the design and operation of Ro-Ro ships."