Safety and comfort as design criteria for High Speed Passanger Craft

At the moment, the research and the development of very high comfort standards for fast passenger ferries are most interesting for designers, ship owners and builders. Comfort, in the case of passenger transportation is strictly connected with safety and both represent the synthesis of man-ship relationship. Comfort on board is one of the key factors for successful passenger ship design; it is strictly connected to ship main characteristics and layout, and deeply influences design choices. While ergonomics are generally considered in passenger ship design, cognitive ergonomic, generally, is still ignored or neglected. Cognitive ergonomic is the analysis of environment human perception; this is a dynamic and complex process where the human mind selects and reads sensorial stimuli to get a significant image of the world. Only recently environmental psychology through cognitive ergonomics has been considered in passenger ship design procedure. Within this frame the optimisation of the man-ship relations according to living environment characteristics, to safety issues by International Codes, and to human biomechanical behaviour aboard has been considered. This work is one of the steps of a research program concerning ship comfort and safety carried on at the Naval Architecture Department of the University of Naples Federico II.