Shaw, E (2023) A practice migration strategy to facilitate implementation of BS EN IEC 61508 in the UK commercial marine sector. Doctoral thesis, Liverpool John Moores University.

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Abstract

In many engineering sectors with the potential to produce major accident hazards in the event of a failure, accepted good practice for implementing functional safety of Safety-Critical Systems (SCS) is considered conformity to the standard IEC 61508. Major accident hazards may potentially occur in the United Kingdom Commercial Marine Sector (UKCMS) in the event of a collision or capsizing of a large vessel, however IEC 61508 is not implemented sector wide.
In this thesis, the International Maritime Organizations (IMO) Formal Safety Assessment is utilised as the framework for a model that determines a series of objectives required to overcome barriers to the implementation of IEC 61508 in the UKCMS. The typical cost-benefit analysis used during a Formal Safety Assessment is enhanced with a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) that assesses the barriers to the standards implementation from perspectives other than financial. The objectives and measures of the BSC are determined using a survey answered by engineers with a range of backgrounds and experience related both to functional safety of SCS in general, and the UKCMS. The rank in terms of importance of each objective, and of each perspective is determined using a fuzzy variant of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), then the top 25 ranked objectives are chosen for further investigation. The current success of the objectives are determined by investigating their progress relative to their measures. Afterwards, further actions for progressing measures below a certain score threshold are determined. Recommendations for achieving these actions are derived from a survey with experts, which are then used to form a strategy for UKCMS companies to migrate from current practice for implementing functional safety of SCS, to practice that aligns with IEC 61508.
Objectives used in the BSC align with the typical perspectives of a BSC, however this project’s first survey indicated the necessity to address regulatory and cyber-security related barriers as well. The validity of the results is measured against their ability to represent the full breadth of the UKCMS, which is dependent on expert participation. The migration strategy provides actions suitable for the current situation regarding conformity to IEC 61508, however the methods used in this project require iteration for continuous use. The methods used in this project and the current iteration of the migration strategy provides a solution for implementing IEC 61508 without a legislative incentive, and may also be useful should the standard be mandated in the future by IMO or a classification society. This thesis concludes with a proposal for the migration strategies implementation and iteration.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	IEC 61508
Subjects:	T Technology > TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General) T Technology > TC Hydraulic engineering. Ocean engineering
Divisions:	Engineering
SWORD Depositor:	A Symplectic
Date Deposited:	13 Mar 2023 14:48
Last Modified:	13 Mar 2023 14:51
DOI or ID number:	10.24377/LJMU.t.00019053
Supervisors:	Matellini, B, Wang, J and Jones, K
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/19053

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