Recently ship safety regulations are being reinforced to improve maritime safety and to prevent maritime pollution by International Maritime Organization. It means that the regulation is becoming more proactive rather than reactive. In the mean time, design philosophy is also moving from rule based design to performance and simulation based design. In this paper, a study on practical application of the damage safety assessment system is carried out. The damage stability and the survivability of a cargo ship that was designed based on current regulation is investigated using performance based design tools in order to improve the safety of the design and verify the performance of the developed damage safety assessment system. To do this, damage scenarios is established and the characteristics and geometry the cargo ship is modeled. A new design alternative is proposed with small change in the internal arrangement based on safety evaluation results of the current design.