Modelling Pedestrian Evacuation Movement on a Swaying Ship

Abstract

With the advance in living standard, cruise travel has been rapidly expanding around the world in recent years. The transportation of passengers in water has also made a rapid development. It is expected that ships will be more and more widely used. Unfortunately, ship disasters occurred in these years caused serious losses. It raised the concern on effectiveness of passenger evacuation on ships. The present study thus focuses on pedestrian evacuation features on ships. On ships, passenger movements are affected by the periodical water motion and thus are quite different from the characteristic when walking on static horizontal floor. Taking into consideration of this special feature, an agent-based pedestrian model is formulized and the effect of ship swaying on pedestrian evacuation efficiency is investigated. Results indicated that the proposed model can be used to quantify the special evacuation process on ships.

Human mobility: Models and applications

“…30). Variations of this model have been used to analyze escape patterns from a building in low visibility conditions [224,215], to assess evacuation plans in skyscrapers [228,229], ships [230] and aircraft [231]. In relation to crowd control, they have also been used to analyze how to mitigate avalanches in the Hajj religious gathering in Saudi Arabia [227,232], in the Notting Hill Carnival in London [233] or, along with mobility models for other transport media, to study evacuation of cities and populated areas in case of natural disasters such as flooding [234,235,236].…”

Experimental study on individual walking speed during emergency evacuation with the influence of ship motion

“…City University of Hong Kong established a mathematical model to analyse the characteristics of human walking under the action of ship sway. It was concluded that the parallel component of the inertial force of the ship's sway motion affects a person's walking speed in the direction of their advance, which is manifested first as acceleration and then as deceleration (Chen et al, 2016). The German Lloyd's Register of Shipping proposed a model for personnel speed reduction (i.e.…”

Passengers' likely behaviour based on demographic difference during an emergency evacuation in a Ro-Ro passenger ship

“…However, the data and parameters specified in the guideline are based on civil building evacuations, and do not take into account the effects on human behaviour of ship movement or family group behaviour, and rarely provide an effective management strategy (Chen et al, 2018(Chen et al, , 2015IMO, 2016;Lee et al, 2003). Compared with the land-based evacuation, evacuating people from crowded passenger ships is a complex and difficult task.…”