Due to the increasing of requests for the passenger transportation on internal waterways, the size of the passenger ships operating on internal water has grewed significatively, requiring a different approach by the Rules for construction.

Some of the new criteria are quite different from the previous requirements, especially for what concerns the damage stability, with more severe requirements about freeboard, weather criteria etc., and this impacted on the design, project, construction.  

Considering that, the  author studies the changements  required by the new rules adopted after the publishing of the Law 2006/87/CE and the consequent new Rules for Inland water .

The author examines the impact of those new requirements for stability, focusing in differences in height of the ship, transversal subdivision, position of safety appliances as rescue areas for shipwrecked people, etc.  to evaluate the real effectiveness of the new rules and what has been the impact on new constructions.

 To perform this analysis with a real case study, the author considers 5 ships build  between 2004 and 2014, and operating  on the main italian lakes, like Lago di Garda, Lago Maggiore and Lago di Como. The  length of the ships is  between 41 and 49 m , and the passenger capacity is from 420 to 700 passengers, so the stability calculation performed and realized for each type of ships, comparies the possibility for the ships realized before the new rules, to match the new requirements , the impact of modifications in case of refitting and  giving a personal advice about the tendency in the future.