Page 9: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (March 2, 2005)

March 2005 9

Last month saw the kick-off meeting of the 12 million Euro research project

SAFEDOR, an initiative that seeks to develop new standards on risk-based ship design and approval. The project has attracted a large list of "who's who" in the European maritime niche, with a total of 53 project partners from all sec- tors of the industry in participation.

Germanischer Lloyd will serve as proj- ect management, and the inaugural meeting was held at its headquarters.

In risk-based ship design, safety levels are considered as objectives of the design process from the outset, rather than being treated as a constraint, as is the case using today's conventional ship design methods and prescriptive rules.

The new approach provides scope for novel and inventive design solutions and, therefore, encourages innovation.

The SAFEDOR project, while envis- aged to benefit the overall health and safety of the international maritime community, is simultaneously designed to raise the competitive profile of the

European maritime niche, a collection of companies that have vast experience, particularly in the "sophisticated ship" market, but which has witnessed its business steadily flow to the Far East … first to Korea, and now to China.

A New Philosophy

Over the next four years, the research project will lay the foundation for a new philosophy of safety in shipbuilding.

The goal of SAFEDOR is to pave the way for the realization of new ideas, materials, system components and processes in ship design - and hence for new, more cost-effective ships.

To reach this goal, it will be necessary to advance and integrate the methods and tools used for risk-based ship design. While SAFEDOR builds upon existing methods of reliability theory and the Formal Safety Assessment approach applied by the International

Maritime Organization (IMO), one of the project's objectives will be to devel- op a proposal for a new regulatory

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Risk-Based Ship Design:

A New Approach to Safety

A. Perez de Lucas, IZAR

News

Dr. P. Sames,

GL (middle), T.

Strang, Carnival (left), Prof.

Vassalos (Univ. of Strathclyde)

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