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48 Maritime Reporter & Engineering News will estab- lish goal- based stan- dards for the design and construction of new ships." According to IMO's Maritime Safety Committee ("MSC") Chair, Tom Allan, speaking on the subject at the recent Connecticut Maritime Association con- ference, goal based standards, or "GBS" in the increasingly visible acronym, should reflect "broad, over-arching safe- ty, environmental and/or security stan- dards that ships will be required to meet during their lifecycles" and provide the "foundation of the future development of international regulatory standards" for the design and construction of new ships. GBS should also be "clear, demonstrable, verifiable, long standing, implementable and achievable, irrespec- tive of ship design and technology; and specific enough in order not to be open to differing interpretations," according to the MSC working group. Allan candidly admitted that progress to date in developing GBS had to be considered preliminary not only because of divergent views of a number of dele- gations but also because some ques- tioned whether there was even a com- mon understanding of the term. The concept does not lend itself to ready def- inition. One attempt at clarification states that GBS are neither prescriptive nor proscriptive; rather the stated goal may be achieved by any number of effective means. For instance, rather than specifying the dimensions, materi- als and strengths of the railing at the edge of a cliff, the goal based approach to safety turns the process around. The underlying goal-people should not fall off the cliff-first needs to be clearly articulated; then the goal may be approached utilizing risk-based tools to identify the effective solutions, only one of which is a fence. Rules and regula- tions are still required, but instead of cir- cumscribing solutions they arise from a rational approach at reaching the goal of established levels of safety. For hundreds of years, the shipbuild- ing industry has relied on practical expe- rience as promulgated in sometimes widely varying national and classifica- tion society rules, regulations, codes and standards. GBS portend nothing less than a paradigm shift in the industry approach to ship design and construc- tion. It is claimed that shipyards will no longer be able to peddle lower steel weights by building to one class soci- ety's rules rather than another's. Engineers will be unable to specify scantlings that vary significantly for similar vessels to be built for the same service. In fact, designers and shipyards will be brought more completely within the IMO regulatory framework than ever before. While the hope is that ship design and construction will become more uniform it is also likely that it will become more complex as well. The real question is whether this ambitious approach can be realized in practical standards and an accepted and workable methodology. The IMO has delegated development of GBS to the MSC which has had sev- eral meetings since the November 2003 Assembly. Some progress has been made in fleshing out a framework for GBS. Prior to the most recent MSC meeting in May 2005, it was provision- ally agreed that a basic five-tier system would be utilized. The first tier, appli- cable to all vessels, established the fol- lowing working goals: Rugged, Marine-Grade Instrumentation from Technical Marine Service, Inc. 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