The intrinsic complexity of the flooding process on ships renders accurate quantification of the flooding risk a highly arduous task, particularly in the context of emergency management, where convolution stems from a multitude of variables, their dependencies and interactions. This is especially true for large cruise vessels, with ever-growing number of passengers, innovative designs and complex internal subdivision. This augments the uncertainty and imposes further challenges on the crew in obtaining a complete overview and making fully-informed decisions following a given flooding event. This paper will present a methodology whereby sensors and analytics are combined utilising probabilistic multi-sensor data fusion to predict the flooding extent with reduced uncertainty to facilitate informed decision-making in emergencies, forming the basis for optimised implementation of emergency response measures for vessel survival and subsequent safe return to port. The framework will be tested with the use of the sensor array onboard an existing large cruise vessel within realistic flooding scenarios. The results demonstrate that the predictions are rapidly converging to the region of the actual damage extent in the presented test-cases, enabling fast and targeted deployment of available mitigation measures with the help of probabilistic supportive evidence. The accurate prediction of flooding extent as presented, is a fundamental prerequisite for, and could be of great assistance in, decision making in emergencies, thus saving lives.

The safe operation of any vessel is challenged by the constraints posed through design as well as maintenance and correct operation of the available safety barriers to ensure their effectiveness. This requires a direct linkage between barrier performance and operational risk management, accounting for potential degradation of the barriers and ensuing corrective actions. Therefore, the introduction of dynamic barrier management is a powerful tool in maintaining design resilience during operation and in emergencies. It is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate the achieved progress in developing a comprehensive approach to address risk in real-time. The authors aim to show how performance information on barrier elements and their respective functions is a) collated, b) aggregated through parametric (empirical) models for identifying barrier relative importance, function criticality and in defining a set of key safety indicators, and c) is intuitively visualized for providing real-time guidance to crew and shoreside management. The practicality of this approach is demonstrated by considering watertight doors as dynamic barriers preventing excessive transient-and progressive-flooding on a cruise vessel during operation. It will be discussed how these methods can be generalized into a framework, enabling operational risk management and subsequent decision support.

It is a well-known fact that the current method for calculating a ship's vertical centre of gravity () following inclining experiments is limited when considering magnitude of applied heel angle and accuracy achieved for certain hull-forms due to the assumption of unchanged metacentre position when the vessel is heeled. New methods for calculating the have been proposed, notably the Generalised and the Graphical methods. This paper aims to test these methods on a range of vessels, as well as present and contrast a new method named, the Polar method. The test will establish the error potential for each method using a purely technical software-simulated inclining experiment. Using the established error potential, a corrected is calculated from actual inclining values, which have been evaluated against the loading conditions for each vessel to see if the stability margins have been compromised. The study confirms the Classical method's dependency on applied heel angle magnitude, the change in waterplane area and that it compromises safety in some cases. The other methods, especially the Generalised and the Polar, produce very accurate results for any floating position of the vessel, highlighting the need to tear down the wall-sided assumption implicit in the Classical method and replace it with the better and more flexible methods.