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34 A. M. YASA and H. AKYILDIZ

FORMAL SAFETY ASSESSMENT OF OFFSHORE SUPPORT
VESSELS

A. Mertcan YASA and Hakan AKYILDIZ
*Istanbul Technical University | mertcanyasa@gmail.com

ABSTRACT

Considering the expanding industry for offshore units, offshore support vessels are also in the trend of
increasing. In this sense, more complex and more demanding technologies are emerging especially for new
designs of these type of vessels. Therefore, it is of great importance to have a framework based on risk
assessment. In the maritime domain, risk is evaluated within the framework of the Formal Safety
Assessment (FSA) which has become an internationally recognized and recommended method. This article
discusses methodological requirements for the risk perspective of offshore support vessels. A perspective
that is proposed here considers risk as a set encompassing the following: a set of plausible scenarios leading
to an accident, the likelihoods of unwanted events within the scenarios, the consequences of the events and
description of uncertainty. For this purpose, we introduce a qualitative scoring system, and we show its
applicability on an exemplary risk model for an offshore support vessel.

Keywords: Formal safety assessment; Risk analysis; Offshore support vessels, risk based framework;
offshore

1. Introduction
It is a fair assessment to say that the development and improvement related to the technology and
the welfare of people can be very costly in regard to safety and money-wise. Also, considering
the environmental effects, especially in last 50 years, these all issues become concern to the
society. More complex and more demanding technology will require more effort in regard to risk
management and this situation becomes a problem to deal with. When we look at the maritime
industry, we have an international organization named International Maritime Organization
(IMO). In order to satisfy the need of the industry on risk management, IMO implemented such
regulations. When the historical background of safety assessment has been checked, it is possible
to go back until 1970s. A good starting point for safety assessments is Probabilistic Safety
Assessments used in 1970s for nuclear industry. After that in 1970s and 1980s for chemical and
offshore industry, QRA (Quantitative Risk Assessment), Seveso Directive and local regulations
have been applied.
For shipping industry, first studies related to the risk assessment have been started in 1990s with
UK House of Lords, Lord Carver Report in 1992 [2]. Following to the in 1992 MSC 62, in 1997
MSC 68 and 2001 MSC 74 has been developed by IMO accordingly. In present time, IMO's 5
April 2002 dated GUIDELINES FOR FORMAL SAFETY ASSESSMENT (FSA) FOR USE IN
THE IMO RULE-MAKING PROCESS (MSC/Circ.1023, MEPC/Circ.392) -will be referred as
Guidelines hereafter- has been developed. Following to the developed guidelines, 2005
Amendment (MSC/Circ.1180, MEPC/Circ.474) and 2006 Amendment (MSC-MEPC.2/Circ.5)
have been developed accordingly. It is fair to say that FSA was introduced at MSC 62 in 1993 for

GiDB|DERGi Sayı 8, 2017