SAFEDOR - Design, Operation & Regulation for Safety
Overview
Background & policy context:
The main idea at the root of the SAFEDOR project was the 'Design for Safety' concept, which describes the integration of safety as a design objective in the design process to minimise risk, alongside traditional design objectives such as minimising power requirements and maximising cargo carrying capacity. Integration of risk and reliability analysis methods into the design process for ships therefore leads to 'risk-based ship design', the subject of SAFEDOR.
It was decided early in the development of SAFEDOR to focus only on four ship types with a significant economic value for Europe: cruise ships, RoRo/RoPax, gas tankers and container vessels. SAFEDOR later also included oil tankers. These vessels are the most knowledge intensive and safety critical which underlines the strategic importance of SAFEDOR to the European maritime industry. It was expected that these ships would be favoured by the new risk-based approach and that the future removing of regulatory constraints would open the route to innovative ship designs and, thus, to improved competitiveness for the companies involved.
Objectives:
SAFEDOR's overall objective was to enhance safety through innovation to strengthen the competitiveness of the European maritime industry.
SAFEDOR aimed to attain this objective by answering two fundamental needs:
- Risk-based ship design and approval will satisfy the European maritime industries' need to deliver ever more innovative transport solutions to their customers.
- Risk-based ship design and approval will also satisfy the European society's need to have increasingly safer transport.
SAFEDOR research activities addressed - and provided solutions to - both aspects and, thus, delivered important building blocks for Europe to sustain world-leadership in safety-critical and knowledge-intensive ships, maritime services, products, equipment and related software. Increasing safety and security of maritime transport cost-effectively was achieved by treating safety as a design objective and not as a constraint, as in current ship design. Increasing the competitiveness of European industry was achieved by systematic innovation in design and operations encouraged by modernising the maritime regulatory system towards a risk-based framework.
Five strategic research objectives were formulated to meet the outlined vision:
- Develop a risk-based and internationally accepted regulatory framework to facilitate first principles approaches to safety.
- Develop design methods and tools to assess operational, extreme, accidental and catastrophic scenarios, accounting for the human element, and integrate these into a design environment.
- Produce prototype designs for European safety-critical vessels to validate the proposed methodology and document its practicability.
- Transfer systematically knowledge to the wider maritime community and add a stimulus to the development of a safety culture.
- Improve training at universities and aptitudes of maritime industry staff in new technological, methodological and regulatory developments in order to attain more acceptance of these principles.
Methodology:
In order to meet the project's objectives, SAFEDOR activities broadly focused on four key aspects: methods and tools to enable risk-based design, a risk-based regulatory framework, application to ship and ship system design and supporting action.
These key aspects of the project can be broken down according to the 6 blocks:
Block 1: Risk-based design entails the systematic integration of risk analysis in the design process targeting risk prevention/ reduction as a design objective. An essential pre-requisite to undertaking this was the availability of fast and accurate first-principles tools.
Block 2: Knowledge of the effect of design changes/measures to enhance safety cost-effectively (considering all major hazards and ensuing accident categories and scenarios) is crucial. This issue was addressed through FSA studies and implementation of first-principles tools.
Block 3: To pursue Block 2 effectively, it was necessary to provide an integrated design environment (IT platform) to facilitate and support a holistic approach to ship design that enables appropriate trade-offs and advanced decision-making, leading to optimal ship design solutions.
Block 4: The next essential step (design approval) required the development and consolidation of a risk-based regulatory framework to set conditions for design approval that would allow linking ship design performance optimisation with risk minimisation.
Block 5: To embed the risk-based design process into the heart of the maritime industry, design teams were assembled representing a large sector of the EU shipping and shipbuilding industries to pursue the design (from concept to approval) of innovative ship types that cannot be approved under the current prescriptive rules.
Block 6: Finally, a knowledge management, training and dissemination system was put in place to maximise benefits by targeting all the stakeholders of maritime safety and to exploit RTD results by systematic evaluation, consolidation and marketing. This system entailed a training course for professionals and four public conferences.
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