Fire prevention and mitigation measures onboard large passenger ships

Fire on board passenger ships is a major hazard not only for the personnel, passengers, and the environment, but for the asset itself. Numerous analyses have been conducted towards fire and explosion events onboard ships, which revealed a steady trend of 10% accounting for total losses per year (Allianz, 2019; Papanikolaou et al., 2015). In addition, fire and explosion events are of outmost importance for passenger ships due to the sheer number of passengers and crew onboard (Baalisampang et al., 2018). However, despite all efforts, regulatory or other, the frequencies remain almost constant. The Safety Enhancing and Monitoring Applications (SEAMAN) project aims to set up the way forward by proposing methodologies and recommendations towards a zero-incident fire ship via continuous monitoring and analysis of onboard systems (Astrup et al., 2016). Therefore, this paper provides an overview of the available studies targeting all sociotechnical aspects with the aim of identifying their strength, shortcomings, and the way ahead with respect to fire/explosion prevention, mitigation, and control.