Towards a systematic organizational analysis for improving safety assessment of the maritime transport system

Safety in maritime operations has become a serious issue in the last 10 years, following the occurrence of an increasing number of incidents and accidents at sea. In this paper we propose a systematic approach that supports safety analyses of the Maritime Transport System (MTS); particular emphasis is put on High Speed Craft (HSC). The approach is mainly based on the development of a functional model that provides a systemic vision of the NITS from the safety point of view; in the early design stage of its development, the model was inspired by a similar approach developed in the air transport system. The functional model supports the validation of Formal Risk Assessment, but can be also used as an aid for the optimisation of resources allocation within the NITS in order to reach a target safety level. An application of the functional model will be shown for the quantification in a more coherent way of the conditional probability of some Basic Event (BE) of an accident (collision) scenario represented as a Fault Tree (FT). Indeed, the potential contribution of human and organisational factors can be quantified by linking the BE of the FT to appropriate variables of the functional model.