Cargo ship safety potential

Abstract

Most of the regulatory documents in the field of shipbuilding are aimed at ensuring and improving the safety of ships, the assessment of which is carried out according to the indicators of individual seaworthiness: buoyancy, stability, strength, unsinkability. In fact, it is claimed that if they are secured, then, as a consequence, the safety of the vessel is also ensured. The latter, in accordance with generally accepted terminology, is the absence of unacceptable risks associated with the design, construction and operation of the vessel, which are determined on the basis of statistics on all types of activities, that is, they take into account existing experience, and not possible random factors of the ship – environment system. The article offers a comprehensive criterion showing the excess of the actual characteristics of the vessel over their dangerous values, which allows you to compare heterogeneous vessels for safety in general, and not only for individual seaworthiness. The method of its calculation, the scheme of formation and numerical values are given, as an example, for three types of vessels of mixed (river-sea) navigation.