Modelling Route Choice in Crowd Evacuation on Passenger Ships

Abstract

This paper proposes an agent-based simulation model with route choice process to predict the crowd behaviours and evaluate the evacuation safety on passenger ships. The model focuses on the behaviours of two common types of passengers that are not typically accounted for during most evacuation analyses, namely, passengers who are not familiar with the ship layout and passengers who have family members or friends with them. In the proposed model, a marker concept is introduced to represent critical routing points of the layout and passenger agents make a route choice based on their surroundings and characteristics instead of just following the shortest routes. The simulation model is tested by two small but targeted scenarios and one comprehensive scenario on a ship deck. For ship designers, a more realistic evacuation time is provided to better assess the evacuation performance of a ship, and a heat map of crowd density is presented to identify possible bottleneck areas.