The main purpose of an evacuation analysis is to verify that a specific ship design will enable people onboard to reach assembly stations in an orderly and timely manner, and hence estimate the time required to abandon ship.

The problem

All passenger ships carrying more than 36 people and with keel laid on or after 1 January 2020 have to prove adequate evacuation times through an evacuation analysis. Shipyards or designers need to show that their design meets the IMO performance standard which, in essence, is the time taken to get all people off the ship. This performance standard is defined as 60 minutes for Ro-Pax ships or ships with three main vertical zones or less, and 80 minutes for ships with more than three main vertical zones.

The solution

EVI™ is a pedestrian dynamics software tool designed specifically for application within the ship design spiral. First released in 2000, EVI™ has a long history of supporting designers and shipyards in analysing ship evacuation procedures and in understanding the effect of ship layout on evacuation and highlighting areas of congestion.

EVI™ provides rapid modelling of the environment and prebuilt demographics for the standard IMO Day and Night cases. Its straightforward interface makes it quick and easy to analyse a ship design against regulatory requirements. The outputs are visual representations of the simulations, which are intuitive to analyse, and a vast array of numerical results in graphs and tables that can support detailed analysis.

Services

Consultancy and support services Safety at Sea Ltd offers clients the service of full evacuation analysis through its software product EVI™.

Based on our many years’ experience in the field of evacuation analysis, Safety at Sea can provide an end-to-end service to analyse ship evacuation of a particular design against the IMO standard tests. Furthermore Safety at Sea is able to use the tool to simulate different pedestrian dynamic problems to advise clients on improving the efficiency of a particular situation: we can analyse port and ship layouts to optimise turnaround times, we can simulate worker patterns in docked ships to deploy staff as efficiently as possible; we can also look at customer experience efficiencies to support operator’s requirements.

Software solution

EVI™ provides a proven and complete SOLAS evacuation analysis solution to support the design, verification and approval of ship designs and to provide evidence to Class. EVI™ provides the advanced methodology for evacuation analysis as defined by the IMO, delivering effective compliance at the design stage.