Safety and security assessment
Review of safety assessment methods
VTT
In the maritime sector the Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) a risk based and systematic approach to safety management. It is recommended by the IMO and its main objective is to guide rule makers to make cost effective decisions in order to improve the maritime safety.
If correctly applied, FSA applications are transparent, traceable and repeatable. FSA acts in a pro active way: it should put emphasis not only on risks which have lead to accidents, but also on risks which may have severe consequences.
FSA consists of the following five steps:
1. Identification of hazards
2. Assessment of risks
3. Generation of risk control options
4. Cost benefit assessment of the risk control options
5. Decision making recommendations concerning the options available
Several FSAs has been performed for different sea areas and the methods used in the analyses differ. The objective of this study is to highlight some of the best practices how to perform FSAs in order to find risk control options to avoid collisions and groundings.
The study is also addressing Ship indexes which have been proposed by the MarNIS project as part of an integrated safety and security management approach. The concept involves an individual ship’s risk index be assigned to each vessel sailing along the European coast in real time. This index depends on different parameters such as type, size and age of the ship, but also environmental conditions such as other traffic and weather conditions will play a role in the determination of the risk index of a vessel in a certain area.
Safety Security & Sustainability