ABSTRACT
In recent years there has been a revolution in the way cruise ships are designed due to the existence of dedicated guidelines for alternative design (IMO, 2001a & 2016). The purpose of this paper is to investigate how to compare and evaluate, in a structured and transparent manner, alternative design solutions and provide objective decision support concerning their equivalence to the prescriptive design. A risk-based approach is put forward for calculating the level of fire safety of a design. In the core of the approach lies a risk function taking into account the probability of fire development onboard and the expected human loss. Advanced tools are used for performing fire and evacuation simulations. The evaluation of candidate designs is conducted through suitable fire safety indices which are extracted from the risk function. For demonstrating the method, a standard deck limited to a fire zone is assessed comparatively with a deck that goes beyond the limits of the zone.
