SAFEDOR (Design, Operation and Regulation for Safety) is about to complete its four years R&D programme. To mark this event, partners of SAFEDOR will present the latest and overall results of their work at a public conference at the premises of IMO on 27 and 28 April 2009. The event will provide an excellent opportunity to familiarise engineers with the principles underlying risk-based ship design, regulation, operation and approval, and to discuss a variety of applications.

Risk-based approaches in the maritime industry started in the sixties with the concept of probabilistic damage stability, were later on widely applied within the offshore sector and have been now adapted and refined to meet the requirements of the maritime and shipping sector. The SAFEDOR approach focuses on risk-based design and approval to provide a transparent and consistent methodology that accounts for the safety performance of a ship design along with other performance variables like speed, cargo capacity, endurance, etc. Thus, the aim of SAFEDOR is not only to provide the technical elements of a new design and approval methodology but also to establish a new safety philosophy.

SAFEDOR tackled this new philosophy in theory and practice. The modernisation of the regulatory framework is one central objective of SAFEDOR and results comprise the submission of Formal Safety Assessments for several types of ships and proposals for a risk-based ship and system approval processes along with acceptance criteria at ship and function level. The second main objective is to establish the process for risk-based design along with a novel decision-making concept and advanced simulation tools to predict the safety performance of a ship in extreme or accidental conditions. To ensure practicability of the new approaches, a variety of applications were performed which have resulted in a series of innovative ship and ship systems concepts and designs.