Evacuation Strategy Considering Path Capacity and Risk Level for Cruise Ship

Abstract

Cruise ships are large and complex, and it is difficult to manually make a plan to evacuate people to safe areas in a short time. Evacuation time and personnel safety are both important for emergency evacuation. This paper proposes an evacuation strategy that considers the path capacity and risk level to guide evacuees in fire; it not only ensures the safety of people on dangerous paths but also reduces road congestion to shorten evacuation time. High crowd density means slow moving speed, an exponential function including straight path and stairs speed characteristics is proposed to illustrate the relationship between crowd density and moving speed. Path capacity constraints are used to avoid the congestion caused by the evacuees in a panic. In order to evacuate the evacuees in the risk areas as soon as possible, this paper divides the path into three risk levels according to carbon monoxide concentration, visibility, and temperature along the paths. The people on the higher-risk paths are given higher priority to enter evacuation paths than those on lower risk. The priority strategy evacuates the people on risk paths to safe areas in less time. This paper models the evacuation network topology of a cruise ship and simulates the evacuation process of some situations that have different numbers of evacuees and path capacity constraints. The evacuation strategies and simulation results are guidelines for the crews to guide the people to evacuate to safe areas when there is a fire accident on the cruise ship.