Evacuation simulation of shipboard fire scenarios

Fire accidents onboard ships are statistically the most frequent hazards that ships encounter at sea. Indeed, several large-scale marine disasters have been caused by fires. The fast developments in ship design and the increasing trend towards innovative layouts, especially in passenger ships, could render prescriptive, rule-based design for safety obsolete. This is compounded by the introduction of regulations for alternative design which rely on evaluation of the design performance by marine authorities and, in turn, requires the use of state-of-the-art simulation tools in order to measure safety, i.e. ensure sufficient evacuation time for passengers and crew onboard. Fire and evacuation modelling is essential to assess the hazards associated with fire scenarios. These tools build on recent advances in field models in the civil sector and continuous improvements on evacuation and human behavioural modelling. The integration of both fire and evacuation models allows a more realistic assessment approach by including the health consequences of fire effects on human evacuees. This paper makes use of this integration of fire simulation and evacuation modelling in order to assess the safety performance of passenger ships when critical fire scenarios occur.