The International Maritime Organization (IMO) proposed the Formal Safety Assessment (FSA) with the purpose of enhancing maritime safety by supporting decision makers to adopt changes to their systems. FSA allows to assess the safety of a system in all its components: personnel, equipment and procedures. FSA is highly technical and complex, but it offers a way forward and a means of escaping from the dilemma of the past, in which an action was too often put off until something went wrong.

FSA is effective in assessing risks not just related to the compliance of regulations and certification processes, but also to the use of innovative technologies and human factor.

FSA, which was originally developed as a response the Piper Alpha disaster of 1988, is still not extensively applied and, which is worse, is mainly used just in pre-design phase. Instead, validation of systems is done by certifiers simply checking regulations requirements compliance.

This paper aims at defining an innovative methodology that could become a future reference against which to establish a policy for managing safety during the whole lifecycle of the maritime system.

One of the main limitation to the adoption of FSA is the “a priori” assessment with no subsequent “a posteriori” validation. Thanks to our expertise in Air Navigation Service systems safety assessment, we propose a customisation of FSA, by introducing some concepts of EUROCONTROL Safety Assessment Methodology (SAM), so providing the mean to validate maritime system safety during its whole lifecycle.