Fundamental concepts of risk-based ship design

Instigated at the Ship Stability Research Centre and promulgated through the concerted efforts of the first pan-European research network SAFER EURORO for a period of nearly ten years is a new safety culture under the theme "Design for Safety" - a life-cycle risk-based design approach, aiming to integrate safety cost-effectively in the ship design process. Through small, albeit bold steps in this direction, it is slowly but steadily being recognised that such an approach can greatly contribute to the enhancement of safety standards in shipping whilst nurturing the evolution of a more scientific treatment of safety that would facilitate the development of innovative and competitive new ship designs. The "Design for Safety" philosophy is thus shaping into a ship design methodology (Risk-Based Ship Design) that facilitates the systematic integration of risk analysis in the design process with prevention/reduction of risk treated as a design objective, alongside standard design objectives. This in turn, offers freedom to the designer to choose/identify optimal solutions to meet safety targets - a radical shift from the current treatment of safety as a design constraint imposed by rules and regulations. On this basis, this paper attempts to elucidate risk-based ship design by detailing the underlying principles and constituent parts of the methodology and by presenting a framework to facilitate the translation from philosophy to implementation.