PALAEMON proposes the development and evaluation of a sophisticated mass centralised evacuation system, based on a radical re-thinking of Mass Evacuation Vessels (MEVs) combined with an intelligent ecosystem of critical components providing real-time access to and representation of data to establish appropriate evacuation strategies for optimizing the operational planning of the evacuation process on damaged or flooded vessels. The intelligent ecosystem of PALAEMON incorporates innovative technologies for sensing, people monitoring and counting and localisation services as well as real-time data during accident time. These will be integrated into an independent, smart situation-awareness and guidance system for sustaining an active evacuation route for large crowds, making emergency response in EU passenger ships more efficient. Continuous monitoring and permanent control will enhance the capacity to detect, prevent and mitigate any issue and potential harm arising from physical and/or man-made accidents and disasters. The proposed ecosystem will include the new IMO standard for data exchange-VDES. Since maritime disasters in recent years are a stark reminder of the imperative need for timely and effective evacuation of large passenger ships during emergency the aim of this project is to maximize the effectiveness of passenger evacuation, during an emergency and/or a serious incident, from large Cruise and RoPax ships by combining the expertise of stakeholders from the field of cruise ship manufacturing, large cruise ship operators, classification societies, sensor and technology organizations, with a multidisciplinary group of innovators (incl. innovative start-ups, consolidated SMEs in the smart ICT domain, experts in the ship evacuation domain from research institutes, international networks in maritime and key industry drivers. MEVs prototypes will be validated in controlled enviroment and the smart evacuation ecosystem will be demostrated in two use cases.