Safety II concept - Resilience engineering in maritime transport
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Keywords
Maritime transport ; Resilience engineering ; Safety IIAbstract
In safety and risk management, the maritime industry tends to adopt reactive strategies. When accidents happen, the most common question that is asked is “why does something go wrong?”. A relevant investigation into the causes is conducted, however, an assessment of the safety level attained by the system that resulted to its general safe performance is not included in the investigation. This means that the current ideas of safety in the maritime sector need to be reviewed because it is likely that they have reached their limit. The Resilience Engineering concept, which prioritizes system performance over system failure, seems promising for the shipping industry.
This thesis delves into the practical implementation of Safety II principles and Resilience Engineering within the maritime transport industry, with the primary aim of enhancing operational resilience and safety outcomes. Safety II places a significant emphasis on dissecting routine tasks and identifying factors contributing to successful outcomes, while Resilience Engineering supplements this perspective with its four key abilities - learn, respond, monitor, and anticipate - providing a holistic framework to evaluate system performance under diverse conditions.
This research employs a case study approach to investigate the applicability of Safety II and Resilience Engineering principles in enhancing safety management systems within shipping companies. By examining a real-world scenario, the study aims to explore how these principles can be effectively implemented. The core objectives include the identification of areas for improvement, particularly from an adaptive and proactive safety standpoint. This involves a critical evaluation of the efficiency of traditional safety approaches within the rapidly evolving and intricate sector of maritime transport.
It is successfully highlighted in this study that there are aspects of the existing shipping operations that can adopt a resilience engineering perspective and integrate the theory’s abilities to learn, monitor, respond and anticipate. Moreover, it is concluded that there are grounds for the introduction and practical application of the resilience engineering principles in shipping, which can be achieved by integration into the Safety Management Systems.