Literature published on the problem of ship slamming in waves is reviewed from the point of view of someone working at a ship research institute. Such an institute is confronted with rather practical questions regarding the acceptability of certain design parameters such as the acceptable amount of bow flare angle for use at sea. The importance of these questions is illustrated by noting that actual slamming or the presumed danger of slamming is the main reason for ship operators to reduce speed or to change heading. The review shows that such questions cannot yet be answered. The problem of the local effect of the impact is very complicated owing to the importance of air inclusions, bubbles in the water, compressibility of water and cavitation effects. Only a computational method properly including all these effects will give an accurate answer; also model tests will not be capable of doing this, if only because the methods to extrapolate the results of models to full scale are not yet developed. The problem of the global response of the ship to a wave impact is closer to being solved. A two-stage approach is proposed, consisting of a computational fluid dynamics method for individual impacts and an approximate method to be included in long-term simulations. However, to arrive at a realistic long-term distribution, one has to account for the seamanship of the captain; avoiding the worst conditions or adapting the ship speed and course has a large effect on the actual extremes. Research on this topic has hardly begun.

The recently finalised Second Generation Intact Stability Criteria (SGISC), produced by the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), contain a level 3 assessment, the so-called Direct Stability Assessment (DSA). This assessment can be carried out using either model experiments or simulations. The fact that such a choice is given implies that the methods are equivalent in accuracy. This assumption has been verified, for one case, by the Cooperative Research Ships (CRS) community. The verification was based on new model experiments and calculated results, using four different programs owned by different CRS members. Results of the verification of the parametric roll failure mode in regular waves were published before, but this study concerns results in irregular seas. The experimental and numerical results are compared in both probabilistic and deterministic manners. The probabilistic comparison showed that the simulation programs considered are sometimes conservative and sometimes non-conservative in the prediction of the probability of an extreme value. The deterministic comparison in head seas showed that parametric roll events were predicted in the simulations in a wave train that showed no sign of important roll events in the measurement. The deterministic comparison in the following seas, on the other hand, showed an accurate fit of experimental and numerical results. It is suggested that predictions could possibly be improved by adding non-linear diffraction forces to the numerical model.