In the past 30 years cruise ships have been continuously increasing in terms of size and complexity. In parallel, on board systems in charge of safety evolved in terms of technology and performances.

Such improvement, however, was not enough to cope with the increasing complexity in safety management, nor to provide the expected support to the operators during casualties. The latter point has shown to be the most critical, considering the trend of personnel cost reduction and the expansion of the cruise market, which caused ship officers to be younger and less trained that in the past years.

It became clear that a new, global approach to safety management has to be adopted. Such approach shall provide to the operators an integrated view and control of all the safety elements and shall actively support them in the selective execution of casualty fighting actions.

The above concepts had driven the development of a new family of safety systems, starting from an integrated safety supervisor and then developing tools such as decision support systems, advanced safety centre and so on.

This article describes this evolution, highlighting the user needs which motivated the development, and the key functions of the developed systems.