Crew-centred Design of Ships – The CyClaDes Project

Abstract

Accident investigations indicate that the majority of ship accidents are in one way or another caused by human error. The underlying causes are manifold, and include aspects related to difficult working environments, inadequate crew competence, and the lack of crew-centered design of equipment, working spaces and/or human machine interfaces.This paper presents some of the results from the EU funded research project CyClaDes (Crew-centred Design and Operations of Ships and Ship Systems). This 3-year project involved a multi-disciplinary team of 14 partners from equipment suppliers, research institutes and classification societies and was concluded in September 2015. The project addressed pressing issues in the shipping industry regarding the need for improvements to the current lack of implementation of crew-centered design principles in the design of ship workspaces and equipment. Specifically, the team worked on six technical work packages with a focus on all the key steps in the ship systems/equipment design and operation lifecycle, the stakeholders, where the barriers to human element integration into system/equipment design and operation occur; and how to best locate, produce, disseminate, and apply human element knowledge within the overall context of shipping.