Safety has always been a central topic in design and operation of new and existing passenger ships. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) sets – under the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) -an international maritime agreement where minimum of safety standards in the design, construction and operation phase of ships are defined. In 2016, a new IMO MSC.1/CIRC.1238 and SOLAS II-2/13 regulation has been published.
This regulation requires that passenger ships evacuation plans through escape routes, need to be assessed by computational means during the design phase. The goals of such an assessment is to provide information on the duration of evacuation, passenger flows throughout the ship and to identify -and eliminate- areas of congestion. This analysis will apply on ro-ro passenger ships constructed on or after 1 July 1999 and passenger ships constructed on or after 1 January 2020 carrying more than 36 passengers.
Dynamic crowd simulation is one of the best available tools to carry out the above analysis and to certify a ship complies with the normative specifications. An example of this kind of software is Pedestrian Dynamics ®, a state-of-the-art simulation environment designed to model any kind of pedestrian infrastructure or complex environment such as a ship. Dynamic crowd modelling helps users to easily evaluate the performance and safety of ships during normal and evacuation situations. Bottlenecks, flow analysis and evacuation times are a common output which can be quickly visualized in 2D and 3D to convince and certify the results to all stakeholders.
Given the fact that passenger ship evacuation analysis is becoming compulsory, crowd modelling will certainly play a major role to ensure that the existing and new passenger ships complies with strict safety regulations. In the presentation INCONTROL will explain how dynamic crowd simulation will support architects and ship builders in the assessment of passengers ships and help them comply with IMO and SOLAS regulations.
Comply with IMO Resolution MSC.404 (96) (SOLAS II-2/13); Regulation 13 – Means of escape by simulating the evacuation of all passengers and crew.
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