Evaluation of risk areas
Using only the Virtual Environment and the ship condition provided by the real-time sensors or
inputted manually, the operator may perform useful queries to assist her/him on the coordination of
emergency teams. Three main functionalities are currently available: identification of risk zones,
compartment isolation and identification of evacuation paths. These functionalities use the topology
and the associations between virtual objects to achieve the final results.
The identification of risk zones is used to find which compartments are in risk of flooding for the
current ship condition. From this, the operator has an initial estimation of the volume that may be
flooded (with the consequent loss of buoyancy) even without running the flooding simulation.
Moreover, the operator may also check if crucial compartments for ship operation are in risk. For
military vessels, these may include communications, damage control, ammunition or power supply
rooms. If this functionality is used in conjunction with the simulation algorithm, then additional
information may be obtained such as the time before each compartment is partially or totally flooded.
Figure 4 (left) presents the output of this functionality when a specific compartment (in green) is
identified as a risk zone