Through its proactive Research and Development (R&D) work, DNV aims to keep its services, competence and technology at the vital forefront of the industry and so help its customers achieve the highest standards in their long-term operations. Exactly how is this put into practice ?
According to Bjørn Kjærand Haugland, head of DNV’s Maritime Development Centre, listening to customers is the fundamental starting point, while keeping a tight focus on practical and realistic solutions and ensuring the other stakeholders’ expectations are met. "In our R&D work, the go-between role of a classification society is significant. Balancing the needs of society at large, various customer groups, regulatory bodies and governments is crucial, but the outcome must always be the same; solutions and rules that support safe and reliable operations in shipping," states Haugland.
He continues: "Especially in times like these, when the shipping industry is facing intensified pressure from authorities and media, classification societies must demonstrate unquestionable integrity when executing their independent third-party role. However, the way we set and enforce our quality standards must be practicable while still addressing the vital risks." Taking a scientific and systematic approach to this, Haugland mentions the shift to risk-based rule development as a framework that allows DNV to bring the stakeholders’ most important concerns directly into the process of developing classification rules.
Major areas of R&D
In addition to risk-based rule development, another R&D programme looks at ways of raising standards by co-operating with LR and ABS, to ensure the competition is not counteracting the work to increase safety at sea.
But R&D is not all about rule development. Haugland explains: "In addition to rule development and the common scantling work with LR and ABS, our R&D efforts are concentrated in five main programmes. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) development is a programme with significant resources and a goal that is two-fold: firstly, to ensure that DNV surveyors have updated and quality-assured data easily available when doing surveys. Secondly, ensuring that our customers can access DNV’s data easily, for instance through DNV Exchange."
Finding better ways to ensure efficient knowledge management and developing competence are clearly two important programmes. As one of DNV’s core operations, this is of course an ongoing effort, co-coordinated by the R&D department.
The load and response programme involves research on wave loads, structural strength and response as well as corrosion prevention. A system and equipment programme addresses vessel systems’ functionality, and equipment and component interaction.
Finally, the environment programme is a means to drive relevant environmental issues into main class in an effort to help the shipping industry improve its current reputation for not taking environmental issues seriously enough.