Formal safety assessment and application of the navigation simulators for preventing human error in ship operations

The International Maritime Organization （IMO） has encouraged its member countries to introduce Formal Safety Assessment （FSA） for ship operations since the end of the last century. FSA can be used through certain formal assessing steps to generate effective recommendations and cautions to control marine risks and improve the safety of ships. On the basis of the brief introduction of FSA, this paper describes the ideas of applying FSA to the prevention of human error in ship operations. It especially discusses the investigation and analysis of the information and data using navigation simulators and puts forward some suggestions for the introduction and development of the FSA research work for safer ship operations.