Risk-based design-realising the triple-a navy

"Design for Safety" refers to a design paradigm introducing safety in design as another objective. This requires explicit consideration and quantification of safety, which is equivalent to evaluating risk during the design process; hence the term “Risk-Based Design”. The essential advance attributable to Risk-Based Design is the holistic, explicit, rational and cost-effective treatment of safety, without which optimal design solutions are not feasible. This is achieved on the basis of principles that support multi-discipline design optimisation and promote the use of knowledge in all forms. More specifically: •A formalised procedure to measure safety consistently (risk analysis / risk assessment / risk management). •Flexibility to allow trade-offs between Performance, Earnings, Risk and Costs; hence focus on life-cycle issues. •Integration of such procedure in the design process (integrated design environment) with focus on holistic optimisation. The “Design for Safety” philosophy and the ensuing formalised methodology, “Risk-Based Design (RBD)” were introduced in commercial shipping as a design paradigm in the 1990s to help bestow safety as a design objective and a life-cycle imperative. This was meant to ensure that rendering safety a measurable (performance-based) design objective, through using first-principles tools, would incentivise industry to seek cost-effective safety solutions, in response to rising societal expectations. It turned out that removing rules-imposed (largely-conservative) constraints and the adoption of a performance-based approach has had much more profound effects than originally anticipated, the full impact of which is yet to be delivered. This is particularly true for knowledge-intensive and safety-critical ships, such as naval vessels and the giants of the cruise ship industry being built today, where the need for technological innovation creates unprecedented safety challenges that cannot be sustained by prescriptive-regulation-based safety. Drawing from the implementation of Risk-Based Design in the cruise ship industry, this paper presents and discusses the process of implementation and impact, demonstrating that all prerequisite scientific and technological developments are in place for Risk-Based Design to be fully implemented in the naval sector as the platform to deliver active, adaptive and affordable vessels