| Cruise ships are highly susceptible to rapid norovirus outbreaks, particularly in high-density recreational venues like swimming pools where hygiene protocols are difficult to enforce. Tradi-tional quantitative microbial risk assessments are often retrospective and typically evaluate single transmission vectors, failing to capture the complex nature of different transmission pathways. To address this operational gap, this paper presents a novel, sensor-driven hybrid framework for the short-term risk assessment of norovirus transmission in maritime recreational water facilities. The proposed framework assesses multiple exposure routes by integrating a knowledge-based fuzzy inference system for primary waterborne transmission with a stochastic Agent-Based Model to quantify secondary fomite-mediated exposure via shared surfaces. Validated against a document-ed historical outbreak, the framework successfully synthesized these independent vectors to cal-culate a predicted risk of 77.0%, demonstrating high alignment with the historical ground-truth risk of 79.3%. By transforming passive environmental sensor data into real-time, actionable bi-osecurity alerts, this framework offers a proactive and highly accurate decision-support tool for mitigating localized norovirus outbreaks before they escalate into ship-wide events. |
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