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Current evacuation procedures involve two phases: mustering, which involves moving people away from a designated area to a safer area or to the muster stations and abandoning the ship (embarkation and launching lifeboats). Evacuating a large and complex environment such as a large passenger ship is a safety- critical and strictly time-bound task, which typically involves thousands of people moving within parts of the ship, assisted by a significant number of crew personnel, and a complex decision-making process based on the evolving situation on-board and the information available to the decision makers. Timely mustering and abandonment require fast and accurate evaluation of ship’s conditions as well as estimation of remaining time.

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However, current procedures and plans insufficiently address the actual challenges of an evacuation, particularly in the presence of flooding, fire hazards and extreme environments. Similarly, they fail to adequately account for human behaviour during stressful situations and lack of resilience.

 

Passengers are instructed to return to their cabins to collect lifejackets before heading for a pre-defined assembly (or muster) station. They must then exit the ship by getting to lifeboats, life raft and possibly evacuation slides, for which they have no training and in some cases are very reluctant due to arrangement of equipment (e.g. use of chute), physical limitations or even personal ones (e.g. elderly or claustrophobic people). The ship is floating on waves and this may result in significant motions and accelerations. Furthermore, in case of flooding, it may list or even capsize rapidly. The assumption that all these people will be able to comprehend and follow instructions or even that the crew will be able to communicate verbally during a crisis is very optimistic. 

 

SafePASS aims to radically redefine the evacuation processes, evacuation systems/equipment and international regulations for passenger ships in all environments, hazards and weather conditions, independently of the demographic factor, by developing an integrated system that will collectively monitor, process and inform during emergencies both crew and passengers of the optimal evacuation routes, coupled with advanced, intuitive and easy to use LSA, resulting as such to a significant reduction of the total time required for ship evacuation and increased safety.

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