Accidents such as the Costa Concordia and more recently the Viking Sky incident cause a societal pressure for improving safety and emergency response in passenger ships. Finding realistic solutions for improvement requires first and foremost an understanding of the current regulatory landscape and the corresponding performance assessment standards. The first part of this paper is dedicated to the provision of a comprehensive outline of the regulatory framework that will ensure compliance of any new system and model developed. The second part is dedicated on the state-of-art projects and novel ideas on ship evacuation analyses and Life Saving Appliances (LSAs) for the purpose of unveiling areas for improvement. Finally, having identified the gaps in the aforementioned topics, suggestions are made on how future work can address the challenges of marine accident response.