Development of an evacuation estimation program for passenger ships

Abstract

The demand and size of cruise ships are continuously increasing due to a rise in personal income. Thousands of passengers and crews are onboard a cruise ship and there are many cabins and large public spaces such as atria and theaters decorated with luxury interiors. Therefore it is easy to cause a huge loss of life and damage to property when accidents happen at sea. To improve the safety of passenger ships, in October 2007, IMO(International Maritime Organization proposed MSC.1/Circ.1238 on 'Guidelines for Evacuation Analysis for New and Existing Passenger Ships' and recommended its use. However, these guidelines are difficult to apply because ship designers need to get information from CAD drawings such as width and length of stairs and corridors and manually calculate the evacuation time. Therefore practical application of the guidelines are not easy especially in case of large passenger ships with tens of decks and thousands of cabins. In this paper, for practical application of the guidelines, an evacuation estimation program is developed using AutoCAD .NET API library of Autodesk Inc. and C Sharp programming language. Furthermore, the application of the program for performance based fire safety design is proposed. ？ 2010 COPPE/UFRJ.