The International Maritime Organisation (IMO) have been promoting "Safety Culture" for the last decade with a great deal of emphasis on human elements, particularly how human errors have led to great loss of life and property (IMO, 2013). It has also been acknowledged that similar accidents/incident occur with repeatedly as human error is proven to be the main cause. Learning from accidents/incidents are one of the good practices that IMO promotes which has not been taken into consideration in training seafarers and industry would benefit from a training tool and programme for its sea-going staff (ACAR, 2011). There has not been a complete attempt and a tool available to promote "Safety Culture" using the past accidents/incidents for the training of seafarers.

This project concerns an innovation development from existing data on accidents/incidents for the creation of a range of scenarios in order to create "Safety Culture" for the education and training of seafarers. The intention of this project is to develop experimental knowledge in order to training seafarers via learning from past accidents and incidents.

The main aims and objectives are
To improve safety at sea and at ports by facilitating experimental knowledge and create a knowledge-base of scenarios for training of seafarers
To develop intelligent exercises based on scenarios created for application in bridge as well as in the full mission simulators
To assess the learning of users via scenarios developed

The partnership is composed of six major education and training centres, private companies, universities in several EU countries supported by their awarding, accrediting and/or certificating authorities.


Making the revolution
SeaSAFER is an online learning and assessment platform in which selected number of accidents scenarios simulated in an innovative approach. Anyone, anywhere in the world is able to access it via a simple internet connection.

Past accidents are usually presented in long reports (written in legal form) or are rarely used in the training of seafarers. It is that fact that neither many institutions/seafarers have sufficient access to those simulators nor seafarers are not usually able to interpret those long reports to learn from. SeaSAFER believes that each accident e.g. collisions, groundings and near-misses etc.is an opportunity to learn from and to take steps to make sure that the same or similar will not happen repetitively.

SeaSAFER with its effort aims to reduce the accidents and incidents when it is adapted to institutions/organisations "safety culture" programme.

"You can do things in an unsafe way and get away with it. Sometimes, more than once, often, but not always…"


Quality Assurance
Partners will work towards to having acceptance from major awarding and accreditation bodies and several other universities, SeaSAFER focuses on reducing the future accidents through learning from past accidents, which are presented in an innovative online learning platform. We worked for this unique solution to make sure it is for everyone (institutions, organisations, seafarers) with cheapest (value) and easiest (access) option.

SeaSAFER team works through expanding its simulated accidents with new editions.


Fewer Accidents
It is expected that there will be less accidents and incidents which can be very costly in human life and injury terms and in financial term. During preliminary work conducted by the partners, SeaSAFER platform is considered necessary by seafarers, maritime academies and shipping companies in the EU, the partnership is convinced that EU and national agencies responsible for maritime affairs will be embracing the course in the short term.