Overview of people localization systems for safe evacuation of large passenger ships

Maritime disasters in recent years are a stark reminder of the imperative need for timely and effective evacuation of large passenger ships during emergency. Tragedies at sea, notably the 2014 South Korean ferry Sewol and the 2012 Costa Concordia incidents, have magnified the urgent need for improvements in the mustering, evacuation, and abandoning procedures, and have led to a series of new global safety initiatives and measures. Driven by this need, several technologies and systems for people localization have been considered, studied and demonstrated over the past decade, which would enable tracking of passengers and crew either on-board, in case of an emergency in order to improve mustering, evacuation, and abandoning procedures, or overboard, after ship abandoning. In this work, we present an overview of these initiatives, evaluating various aspects of such systems, their advantages and disadvantages. Key factors that are considered in our study have been retrieved after extensive analysis of end-user data, acquired over the past three years in the framework of the Lynceus2Market EU funded project (H2020), which has brought together European global players in the field aiming at implementing the first market replication of these technologies and products.