VELOS: A VR platform for ship-evacuation analysis

Abstract

"Virtual Environment for Life On Ships" (VELOS) is a multi-user Virtual Reality(VR) system that aims to support designers to assess (early in the design process) passenger and crew activities on a ship for both normal and hectic conditions of operations and to improve ship design accordingly. This paper focuses on presenting the novel features of VELOS related to both its VR and evacuation-specific functionalities. These features include: i) capability of multiple users' immersion and active participation in the evacuation process, ii) real-time interactivity and capability for making on-the-fly alterations of environment events and crowd-behavior parameters, iii) capability of agents and avatars to move continuously on decks, iv) integrated framework for both the simplified and the advanced method of analysis according to the IMO/MSC 1033 Circular, v) enrichment of the ship geometrical model with a topological model suitable for evacuation analysis, vi) efficient interfaces for the dynamic specifi-* Manuscript (2nd REVISION) 2 cation and handling of the required heterogeneous input data, and vii) post processing of the calculated agent trajectories for extracting useful information for the evacuation process. VELOS evacuation functionality is illustrated using three evacuation test cases for a ro-ro passenger ship.

Virtual Reality for Fire Evacuation Research

“…So far, VR has been used in several studies on diverse aspects of human behavior in fire, such as evacuation from buildings [10,19,[29][30][31][32], occupant behavior in road tunnel fires [33][34][35], fire training [36][37][38][39][40], and other areas of safety and security research [41][42][43].…”

Modelling Pedestrian Evacuation Movement on a Swaying Ship

“…The Equations (1) to (6) in Section 2 together describes forced movement pattern for a pedestrian on a swaying ship. It should be noticed that in reality, the ship swaying induced force component F s for a pedestrian might be very complex.…”

“…The two full scale drill exercise projects, i.e., "FIRE-EXIT" and "SAFEGUARD" have provided valuable information for model validation, especially for "maritime-Exodus" [5]. Some other models have also been established including, AE-NEAS [11], EVI [1] and VELOS [6]. The former two models are grid-based models, and thus have great advantage in computing efficiency, yet the discretization may affect their ability to model environmental space and detailed pedestrian motion when compared with the last two continuous space models.…”

Simulation of Passenger Evacuation Process in Cruise Ships Based on A Multi-Grid Model

“…By comparing the simulation results with the experimental data, it was found that the SIMPEV software met the acceptance criteria of the data. Ginnis et al [25] applied the "Virtual Environment for Life on Ships" system to the three-dimensional visualization model of the ship evacuation simulation and tested the system in a rolling passenger ship. Kim et al [26] defined the attributes and behaviors of evacuated individuals based on the PECS model [27].…”