Learning from experience in the context of autonomous ships: An opportunity for a step change in generating safety knowledge?

Abstract

The maritime industry has been increasingly trying to incorporate more proactive approaches for safety both in the design and operation phases of the life-cycle of ships. However, learning from experience has remained a mostly reactive exercise in the aftermath of major marine accidents and its effectiveness is questionable considering the recurrence of accidents with common contributing factors. In addition, the development of autonomous ships that will be radically different and more complex systems begs the question whether learning needs to be redefined to ensure an adequate level of safety performance throughout their life-cycle. In this context, this paper presents a novel framework for managing risk knowledge inspired by the way the biological immune system remembers not previously encountered threats to implement a faster immune response when the same or similar threats are faced in the future. In this novel framework learning is described as a distributed life-cycle process with interacting components in the design and operation phases. As this framework is equally applicable to conventional and autonomous ships, the latter are considered an opportunity to change the way the maritime industry thinks about learning from experience.