Designing for safety in passenger ships utilizing advanced evacuation analyses—A risk based approach

This paper describes a novel set of well-defined evacuation scenarios for use in advanced evacuation analyses of passenger ships according to present maritime safety regulations. The scenarios are based on a recently performed risk assessment of passenger ship evacuation and can be related to actual accident scenarios, covering the major hazards passenger ships are exposed to. Furthermore, a risk-based methodology for using the set of scenarios in evacuation performance evaluation is proposed and it is demonstrated how the scenarios can be used to relate actual design options to the overall level of risk associated with the ship. The paper includes a brief introduction and describes the background for developing the evacuation scenarios. The results from a recently performed risk assessment is reviewed and it is explained how this can be used as basis for deriving a complete set of realistic evacuation scenarios. Furthermore, it is outlined how to use the evacuation scenarios to estimate the overall risk associated with a specific passenger ship. Finally, possible future developments of the maritime safety regulations have been discussed and it has been demonstrated how the proposed set of scenarios will facilitate the emergence of truly risk based probabilistic safety regulations.