A maritime safety on-board decision support system to enhance emergency evacuation on ferryboats

ABSTRACT

Planning emergency evacuation operations in a proactive manner in public marine transportation systems is a critical success factor for passenger and crew safety. Despite the fact that there is a growing attention on safety issues for marine transportation systems, providing a real-time decision support for evacuation planning under different emergency conditions has not yet been addressed. In this context, this paper contributes to the related literature by providing a comprehensive methodology including simulation and statistical analysis along with a three-module decision support system (DSS) for ferryboat emergency evacuation. Emergency evacuation and fire environment are simulated via Maritime EXODUS V5.1 and SMARTFIRE V4.3, respectively. The methodology is applied to a real-life Ro-Ro ferry, and the results not only revealed significant factors on emergency evacuation performance, but also demonstrated the validity of the developed decision support system.

KEYWORDS:

• Marine transportation
• ferryboat
• emergency evacuation
• simulation
• decision support system

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge the Istanbul Sea Buses Industry and Trade (IDO) for the cooperation in providing data and measurements on the ferry.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) [grant number: 215M246].