Quality Management of Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) Process

摘要

The Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) process, proposed during MSC 66 at the IMO and subsequently released as Interim Guidelines (MSC/Circ.829-MCPC/Circ.335) has generated a number of applications over the past few years, particularly in MSC 73, MSC 74, MSC 75 and MSC 76. These applications cover a wide area of interests in the marine field, most important one being the FSA Studies on Bulk Carrier Safety by various Administrations and IACS. It becomes imperative that the FSA studies being conducted now towards the development or upgrading of future Rules are based on systematic quality management principles, to avoid a wide variation in the quality and conclusions from the FSA process. The five-step FSA process is considered suitable for application of the "process approach" as per ISO 9001:2000 requirements. This application of the Quality Management Standard would ensure that the quality objectives of each of the Steps are identified, and attained through use of appropriate techniques and data by the FSA team. The "process flow" during each of these steps are required to be worked out, and the pertinent issues viz. necessary inputs, activities, sub-processes, critical parameters, controls and measurements are to be identified to arrive at the desired outputs. Such a 'process approach' would assure transparency of the activities behind the FSA as well as reliability of the concluded results. The paper presents a proposal for the application of the above quality management methods to the FSA procedures using a 'process approach'. Typical 'Process Flow Diagrams' for the various steps of FSA process along with the quality parameters are included in the paper. A proposal for internal validation of an FSA application prior to submission to the decision makers is also covered in the paper.