On a risk perspective for maritime domain

In the maritime domain, the risk is evaluated within the framework of Formal Safety Assessment (FSA), introduced by International Maritime Organization in 2002. Although the FSA has become internationally recognized and recommended method, the definition, which is adopted there, to describe the risk, seems to be too narrow to reflect properly the actual content of the FSA. Therefore this article discusses methodological requirements for the risk perspective, which is appropriate for risk management in the maritime domain with the special attention to maritime transportation systems (MTS). This perspective considers risk as a set encompassing the following: the set of plausible scenarios leading to an accident, the likelihoods of the unwanted events within the scenarios and the consequences of the events. These elements are conditional upon the available knowledge about the analyzed system, and understanding of the system behaviour, therefore these two are inherent parts of risk analysis, and need to be included in the risk description.