Modeling Passenger Evacuation on Unstable Ground

Over the past few years, many people have perished owing to serious disasters on ships sailing in high seas. Following tragedies of this kind, more attention has been paid in the area of ensuring onboard passenger safety. Evacuation analysis, aiming at evaluating ship evacuation performance, adopts mathematical models to investigate total evacuation time by taking into account influential factors including pedestrian age, speed and route choice, which is similar to general building evacuation analysis. However, when compared with general buildings, it is noticed that ship evacuation is unique because ships display a six-degree-of-freedom motion feature due to periodic water movement and wind influence. As a result of this feature, the walking characteristics of pedestrians aboard ships show notable differences from level ambulation. Considering this important feature hasn't been incorporated in almost none of the current ship evacuation models, a new model was proposed to explore pedestrian movement dynamics subject to ship motion. Simulation results indicate that this model can capture well-known empirical pedestrian features, and the effects of ship motion on pedestrian movement is complex and unneglectable. The proposed model can thus serve as a useful tool for evaluating passenger ship evacuation performance.