Abstract
According to the increase of the requirement for the safety and environmental protection at sea, safety is a core design factor of maritime systems. Safety is defined as a perceived quality that determines to what extent the management, engineering and operation of a system is free of danger to life, property and the environment. There are many possible approaches in dealing with the safety of ships. The risk-based approach is one of the most systematic and reasonable way currently in design, operation and regulatory works for ship safety. This paper proposes a concept of total risk management for ship safety, and introduces a prototype system implemented based on this concept as a framework of design and operation of ships.