Implementing resilience to the maritime industry: practical issues and findings

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to review and analyze the paradigm of implementing resilience in day-to-day practice within the maritime domain. Currently, there is an increasing pressure on tanker companies from industry stakeholders, such as the well- known oil majors, to minimize their incidents down to zero. Although such a target may seem rather unrealistic, many shipping companies, now share the vison of contributing to a zero-incident industry. In this effort, one of the most effective strategies/policies appears to be resilience for seafarers which is promoted through specific modules. The resilience concept as it has been introduced, includes the training and familiarizing of selected seafarers with the specific resilience techniques; the selected and trained seafarers are becoming the so called facilitators who undertake the task to introduce the concept of resilience on-board ships. The paper is mainly focused on the effectiveness of resilience based approach as this is introduced and dealt with in the tanker industry. The overall exercise, may be pertained in the framework of Safety-II and pro-activeness; it is indeed promising and aids seafarers to minimize human error in a difficult environment as it the maritime operations and practices.