Fotios Stefanidis

Within the expansive domain of maritime safety, optimizing evacuation procedures stands as a critical endeavour. After all, evacuation is literally the last and fundamental safety level afforded to mariners and passengers. Recent incidents have rekindled interest in assessing the performance of this ultimate safety barrier. However, addressing evacuability requires a holistic approach. The authors present herein the setup, simulation, and ultimately evaluation of a novel approach and its ability to rigorously assess multiple innovative risk-control options in a challenging, realistic setting. Moreover, its benchmarking against conventional regulation-dictated evacuation processes is captured distinctively along with the relative effectiveness of each proposed measure. Such measures include smart technologies and procedural changes that can result in substantial improvements to the current procedures. These will impact the ongoing discourse on maritime safety by providing insights for policymakers, vessel operators, emergency planners, etc., and emphasize the need for further research and development efforts to fortify the industry against evolving safety challenges.

The subject of damaged stability has greatly profited from the development of new tools and techniques in recent history. Specifically, the increased computational power and the probabilistic approach have transformed the subject, increasing accuracy and fidelity, hence allowing for a universal application and the inclusion of the most probable scenarios. Currently, all ships are evaluated for their stability and are expected to survive the dangers they will most likely face. However, further advancements in simulations have made it possible to further increase the fidelity and accuracy of simulated casualties. Multiple time domain and, to a lesser extent, Computational Fluid dynamics (CFD) solutions have been suggested as the next “evolutionary” step for damage stability. However, while those techniques are demonstrably more accurate, the computational power to utilize them for the task of probabilistic evaluation is not there yet. In this paper, the authors present a novel approach that aims to serve as a stopgap measure for introducing the time domain simulations in the existing framework. Specifically, the methodology presented serves the purpose of a fast decision support tool which is able to provide information regarding the ongoing casualty utilizing prior knowledge gained from simulations. This work was needed and developed for the purposes of the EU-funded project SafePASS.

Evacuating a large and complex environment, such as a large passenger vessel, either cruise or RoPax, is a safety-critical task that involves thousands of people in motion and a complex decision-making process. Despite the significant enhancement of maritime safety over the years, various hazards still pose threats to passengers and crew. To deal with this reality, the SafePASS project radically redefines the evacuation process by introducing novel technological solutions. In this context, this paper presents, in detail, an enhanced risk model for the ship evacuation process in order to facilitate the understanding of the actual risks of the process in fire and flooding accidents, and to assess various risk control measures and options toward risk mitigation. The risk model covers the entire event sequence in emergency cases on board, until the survival at sea phase, and it is constructed in two levels, following a combination of event tree analysis and Bayesian networks. Results show the risk corresponds to baseline scenarios for each accident case, which are also verified by relevant IMO and EMSA studies, and an example case of risk control option (RCO) is introduced to the model to demonstrate its ability to assess RCO’s efficiency in terms of risk reduction.

Accidents such as the Costa Concordia and more recently the Viking Sky incident cause a societal pressure for improving safety and emergency response in passenger ships. Finding realistic solutions for improvement requires first and foremost an understanding of the current regulatory landscape and the corresponding performance assessment standards. The first part of this paper is dedicated to the provision of a comprehensive outline of the regulatory framework that will ensure compliance of any new system and model developed. The second part is dedicated on the state-of-art projects and novel ideas on ship evacuation analyses, Life Saving Appliances (LSAs), Search and Rescue (SAR) with the purpose of unveiling areas for improvement. Finally, having identified the gaps in the aforementioned topics, suggestions are made on how future work can address the challenges of marine accident response.