Impact: More Than Maritime Risk Assessment

Journal article, 2012

The development of a new technology, the definition of a new regulation or an organisational change aims to increase a positive performance (i.e. safety and cost effectiveness) or decrease a negative performance (i.e. occurrence of accidents or workload) in a system. However, change can also be the origin of consequences that have not been anticipated during the design phase. Such consequences can be positive, negative or damaging for the system. Consequently, an assessment phase is often integrated into technical, regulatory or organisational design activities. This assessment phase is generally structured with hazard identification and risk assessment steps that are followed by a cost benefit analysis and formulation of recommendations. The IMPACT project aims to extend the scope of the hazard identification phase generally based on traditional failure analysis methods (i.e. FMEA, THERP) by integrating stakeholder expertise and applying resilience engineering approaches of safety management. The project has also tested the possibility to use a cluster of bridge simulators together with a system for data collection and visualization in order to explore the consequences of change in maritime settings.