Risk-based design of naval combatants

The present paper introduces a risk-based design concept to naval ship design. It extends an earlier proposed basic design concept by the authors for the evaluation of the survivability of surface combatants by semi-empirical naval ship stability criteria, by introducing modern assessment methods for ship's behaviour after flooding, namely by implementing numerical simulation tools for assessing the risk after flooding. The introduced method was applied to the assessment of the damage stability of a generic frigate operating in specified seaway conditions and typical results of this study are presented and discussed.