Determinants, methods, and solutions of evacuation models for passenger ships: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Passenger ships facilitate the mobility of people at sea and are a significant revenue stream for societies. Simultaneously, they should meet safety standards. One of the main safety pillars is offering passengers a reliable emergency evacuation plan. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has disseminated guidelines for passenger ships to enhance the evacuation process understanding. Although the number of passenger ships is rising worldwide, implementing IMO's guidelines, particularly advance evacuation analysis, is still a young research area. Hence, this paper attempts to study previous research on human evacuation from the IMO perspective to uncover the current position of the issued guidelines in the literature. Accordingly, this research reviews 115 research publications published in scientific journals, peer-reviewed conferences, and doctoral and master dissertations from January 1999 to August 2022. As a result, the authors present the literature review of state-of-the-art papers to establish a firm foundation of past research. After identifying gaps, breakthrough points are clarified for future research about the benefits of handling uncertainty in input parameters, understanding human evacuation behavior, mutual interrelation among evacuation factors, and potential adoption of digital technologies in human evacuation from passenger ships.