Certifying tomorrow’s innovations
The marine industry is thriving with innovations improving performance and sustainability. Very high voltage DC electric propulsion, batteries using lithium or sodium ions, hydrogen propulsion, hydrofoils, new materials, new production techniques, electronic comms. The list goes on.
It’s an exciting time, but it also creates a challenge for a certification body, like HPiVS, and for insurers and regulators.
If new products are running before the standards can keep up, how do we show insurers, financiers, and customers that as well as being exciting, they are also fit for purpose and safe?
The solution is risk assessment.
New Risk Assessment Reference Guide for Small Craft
In response to the need to develop a way to demonstrate safety for innovative products, HPiVS’s CEO, Alasdair Reay and Nick Swift of Hydrogen Afloat have developed a Risk Assessment Reference Guide for Small Craft.
Inspired by similar reference guides in the automotive and rail industries, it provides the small craft industry with the correct method to carry out a risk assessment to demonstrate a product is safe.
As this document is so important to the global industry, we believe the guide should belong to the industry. Our draft guide is currently being reviewed by the International Council of Marine Industry Associations (ICOMIA)’s technical committee. ICOMIA will then publish the final document, which we anticipate will be available from early 2026.
We hope this guide will be globally adopted as the industry’s way of handling the conformity assessment of innovative products.
An agreed method for demonstrating safety
The Risk Assessment Reference Guide sets out a method for using Potential Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) on an entire craft, a system, sub-system or even a component. It recognises that some systems don’t need the complexity of a full FMEA and so the guide also sets out how the Bow Tie Method may be applied where only one or a small number of hazards exist.
In response to a request from ICOMIA, the guide includes a modified version of the “Significance Test” used by other industries. This can be used to help a European duty holder identify when a modification to an existing craft constitutes a “Major Craft Conversion” requiring formal Post Construction Assessment and certification to the EU Recreational Craft Directive.
Do you have an innovative project?
We know that marine safety regulators need to engage closely with industry innovators to ensure guidance is workable and meets evolving needs.
This Risk Assessment Reference Guide has been developed using our extensive experience working with diverse marine industry projects around the world, including hydrofoiling and hydrogen vessels. We’ve also drawn on risk assessment expertise from other industries, including nuclear and the railway industry.
To make sure the guide is as robust as possible, we are looking for innovative projects to trial using it.
Please get in touch with us if you’d like to get involved.
Developing the new Risk Assessment Reference Guide for Small Craft: Alasdair Reay, CEO HPiVS
The automotive industry has its own ‘reference guide’ for how to do a risk assessment using Potential Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA). This document has been created by a group of competitors (Ford, Chrysler, GM) with an aim to harmonising how risk assessment is executed in the industry. It has been so successful, every car manufacturer trains their staff on how to risk assess in line with the guide, wherever they are located in the world. The train and aerospace industries have something similar.
Boats have been around for far longer than cars and planes and yet the small-craft industry is, suddenly, awash with innovation: very high voltage DC electric propulsion, batteries using lithium or even sodium ions, hydrogen propulsion, hydrofoils, new materials, new production techniques, electronic comms that allow the owner to steer their boat from their bedroom….. at home etc. There are no industry standards for most of these and where there are standards, they lag behind the innovation of the pioneers who develop them.
How do manufacturers of such equipment demonstrate that their products are safe? Risk assessment is the only way and yet the small craft industry has no recognised method as to how this should be done. HPiVS has found that most small-craft manufacturers don’t have comprehensive risk assessment experience. As a result, in early 2025, HPiVS began to draft a small-craft industry risk assessment guide. Learning from those other industries, it is not a formal standard which is the copyright of a standards body. Instead it is a reference guide, owned by the industry, which ICOMIA has agreed to publish.
In developing the guide, I’ve used my own risk assessment experience from both the nuclear and offshore industries. This has been alongside fellow developer, Nick Swift, of Hydrogen Afloat, who has risk assessment experience from the train industry.
The risk assessment reference guide sets out a method for using FMEA on an entire craft, a system, sub-system or even a component. It also recognises that some systems don’t need the complexity of a full FMEA and so the guide also sets out how the Bow Tie Method may be applied where only one or a small number of hazards exist.
During the development phase, ICOMIA also asked if there was a way to use the risk assessment method to help a European duty holder identify when a modification to an existing craft constituted “Major Craft Conversion” requiring formal Post Construction Assessment and certification to the EU Recreational Craft Directive. As a result, the guide includes a modified version of the “Significance Test” used by other industries.
Risk assessment is only as good as the data and openness of those that conduct it. The guide can only provide supporting testimony for a decision and should never be considered as providing a definitive and unquestionable justification. But if the industry uses it, and safety proliferates, then over time, it will become “the industry standard”.
Important: FMEA involves scoring and this requires thresholds. The critical challenge is finding the definitions for each point-scoring threshold. These must be carefully worded and specific to the industry. Other industries have iterated their way to the definition of thresholds over time. They have also broken down their products with different thresholds for sub-systems and components. The small craft industry may need to do the same and it will take time.…. But we at least we have started the journey.