SAFECO II aimed to devise and demonstrate risk assessment techniques for improved technologies and organisation of communications among coastal vessels.

The main objectives of SAFECO II have been:

• to survey previous projects which have been addressing communications in marine transportation, and to identify proposed solutions; additionally to describe solutions (equipment, training schemes, procedures, policies, etc.) for the identified problems;
• to further develop the Collision Avoidance Advisory System (CAAS) to include a transponder interface, and to integrate it with an Electronic Chart Display (ECDIS);
• to further develop the Simulator Exercise Assessment (SEA) system to establish training improvement measures;
• to perform simulator exercises to analyse the effect of providing transponder information;
• to outline the interaction between the proposed solutions, present standards and codes, and total quality operations;
• to develop risk models for the communication process and consequence quantification (fatalities, environmental and economical impacts);
• to evaluate solutions in terms of costs and cost distribution on the parties involved, and in terms of risk reduction;
• to define scenarios for which the outlined solutions can be assessed within a risk analysis framework, and to analyse the defined scenarios with respect to cost/benefit;
• to further develop the Marine Accident Risk Calculation System (MARCS) to demonstrate the use of risk assessment methods for cost/benefit analysis of solutions.