BV Backs High-Speed Craft Safety Design Tool

Bureau Veritas (BV) has backed a new tool designed to enhance the safety and cost-effectiveness of high-speed craft. Dubbed the Safety at Speed (S@S) tool, the product was developed by a consortium of 15 companies backed by EU research funding. "This S@S design tool will help designers, class societies, yards and government authorities to evaluate high-speed craft at an early design stage, improving safety and cost-effectiveness," said Pierre Besse, research director of Bureau Veritas. The intent is to extend and customize the product for other ship types. The aims of the EU-funded S@S project were to develop new design tools and methodologies that would raise the profile of safety issues at the very beginning of the design process. These aims have been exceeded with the delivery of a semi-automated design tool capable of evaluating the safety level and cost of a High Speed Craft at the preliminary design stage. "We need more high-speed ferries, and more innovative ship designs to solve our traffic problems on the roads," says Besse. "But the history of high-speed craft is quite short, so designers, yards and regulators have very little experience to draw upon. This in turn has created new concerns of how the safety of HSC can be assured when there is a lack of historical data against which to assess new projects. S@S goes a long way to helping overcome that lack of data by building in first principles at the design review stage."