Shipping Safety into the Naval Industry

Safety engineering and legislation (IEC-61508, 61511 etc.) has been entrenched in many industries (O&G, process) for years. Although regulation has been progressed by Lloyd’s Register, the Marine industry has been inherently slower to accept and adopt functional safety practices employing quantitative analysis. As in other industries, a review of legislation would usually be kick started by a large-scale accident.  

With an aim to reducing manning costs, marine vessels are now developed with increasing amounts of automation in their control systems. Incidents resulting from failures of these systems are becoming more frequent due to either poor safety considerations when designing the systems, or operators not understanding interactions with the automated systems. Preferably, before incidents increase in frequency or severity, engineered safety using inherent safety controls will become a more important factor in the Marine sector.  

Opposition to functional safety has primarily been due to cost and scheduling purposes. Businesses have to be profitable to survive, and Safety Engineering can be viewed as introducing programme delays and unnecessary costs. In reality, other safety related programmes have demonstrated the benefits of following safety related development programme.  

As in most instances of programme delay, poor initial requirements capture causes late changes to be incorporated to products, resulting in escalating delays and costs.  

If safety is engaged early in the product lifecycle, then programme delays and unnecessary safety risk can be reduced and managed effectively throughout the lifetime of the ship. In all projects, there can be conflicts between safety and security design, but early integration of safety will allow you to balance safe, secure and reliable operation, ultimately improving the quality of your end product.  

Major savings can be made by reducing maintenance on systems that have been proven to have lower integrity due to quantitative analysis and proof testing – provided it has been demonstrated to be As Low As Reasonably Practicable (ALARP). If your company does not embrace safety integrity within its culture, you can run the risk of losing credibility, a competitive edge within the marketplace and incur expensive damage to reputation.

In conclusion, the manufacturer and end user will incur far higher costs of redesign if changes are needed for safety when the product has reached post-development. If left unchanged, consider the following: If a designed system fails and causes an incident, will the company reputation be tarnished and product orders halt? Remember: If somebody is injured or dies in an accident, any company individual can be found liable and prosecuted.