Bringing operational risk into the room: how simulation changes maritime safety

Maritime Safety Week is a timely reminder that safety is shaped long before a programme reaches trials or service. In a maritime environment becoming more autonomous, connected and digitally enabled, the choices made during concept development, design and integration matter more than ever.

This year's theme, "Every day, everyone", matters because the people who understand operational risk best are not always close enough to the design decisions that can create it.

Simulation changes that conversation. A credible synthetic environment allows operators to engage with design while there is still time to influence it. They can: experience how a capability behaves under failure; test how people, platforms and systems interact; and, explore what happens when assumptions are stressed by weather, tempo, degraded systems, cyber effects or unexpected human decisions.

Critically, mission rehearsal gives duty holders and operators a practical way to express the risk they are prepared to hold and to avoid analysis of edge cases that will not arise in the real-world.

This is particularly important as maritime capability becomes more complex. The Royal Navy's vision for a Hybrid Navy is a clear example: crewed platforms, uncrewed systems, autonomous behaviours, digital infrastructure and human decision-makers will all need to operate as part of a coherent system. Safety cannot be proven by looking at each element in isolation. It has to be understood through the way the whole system behaves and how missions will be performed.

Capabilities such as the Digital Innovation Simulation Centre (DISC), BMT REMBRANDT and BMT SEAS help create this evidence base by modelling complex behaviours, rehearsing decisions, exploring operational constraints and building confidence before commitments become costly to change.

As Maritime Safety Week reminds us, making safety routine means involving the right people in the right conversations at the right time. For future maritime capability, that means bringing operators closer to design and giving them the evidence they need to make informed safety decisions earlier.

Mark Steel
Capability Director for UK & Europe