Analysis of Naval Ship Evacuation Using Stochastic Simulation Models and Experimental Data Sets

The study of emergency evacuation in public spaces,buildings and large ships may present parallel characteristic in terms of complexity of the layout but there are also significant differences that can hinder passengers to reach muster stations or the lifeboats.There are many hazards on a ship that can cause an emergency evacuation,the most severe result in loss of lives.Providing safe and effective evacuation of passengers from ships in an emergency situation becomes critical.Recently,computer simulation has become an indispensable technology in various fields,among them,the evacuation models that recently evolved incorporating human behavioral factors.In this work,an analysis of evacuation in a Landing Helicopter Dock(LHD)ship was conducted.Escape routes specified by the ship’s procedures were introduced in the model and the six emergency scenarios of the Naval Ship Code were simulated.The crew and embarked troops were introduced with their different evacuation behavior,in addition,walking speeds were extracted from data set collected in experiments conducted at other warships.From the results of the simulations,the longest time was chosen and confidence intervals constructed to determine the total evacuation time.Finally,results show that evacuation time meets regulatory requirements and the usefulness and low cost of the evacuation simulation for testing and refining possible ships’layouts and emergency scenarios.

Simulation Emergency Fire Evacuation Model for Nuclear Power Plant

Simulation of egress is vital for minimizing losses during fire disasters, however accurate simulations are scarce and real-life data is hard to come by. In this paper, a Proposed Wireless Fire Evacuation Model (PWFEM) is proposed to simulate fire evacuation process in a short time to minimize evacuee’s exposure to the harmful radiation and fire hazards. The PWFEM simulation realistic by supposing fire scenario at cabined contains electrical cables inside a standard Main Control Room (MCR) in a Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) building. In addition, a new Hybrid Safest Shortest Exit (HSSE) is developed which consists of three stages: safest route based on rules-based technique, evacuees location based on the DV-hop technique [1] and shortest route that depends on Dijkstra technique. The PWFEM Simulations are appreciated to yield a realistic fire scenario by using a telecommunications TCP/IP network in form of server and client sides that help in transfer data inside internal networks in the NPP building. On the server-side, suppose that Consolidated Model of Fire Growth and Smoke Transport (CFAST) fire modeling is applied to simulate the fire scenario in MCR through CFAST model to generate fire products as output data in excel sheets and sends them to the client-side. The client-side then runs HSSE to produce the tree map for safest and shortest routes to help the evacuee for safe exit from his/her location. HSSE can be implemented on evacuee’s watches. From the results, it is concluded that PWFEM can simulate the fire scenario inside MCR, furthermore it is validated that HSEE can be used as an efficient emergency fire evacuation technique that can produce safest and shortest exit route for evacuee in any location inside NPP in very small time. In addition, PWFEM can be used for simulating fire evacuation inside any high-risk buildings and can appreciate yielding any realistic fire scenario with many types of fire sources in different places inside buildings.

Development of an agent-based indoor evacuation model for local fire risks analysis

Evidence suggests that in the event of a fire accident, a certain number of building occupants escape through smoke-filled environments. Consequently, evaluating the corresponding evacuation performance under such life-threatening conditions is important for advancing fire safety analyses. This study aimed to develop a fire-integrated evacuation model to consider the effects of spreading fire hazards (i.e., radiation, temperature, toxic gas, visibility) on evacuees in a room fire evacuation scenario. Furthermore, a novel quantitative approach was introduced to evaluate evacuees’ local fire risks and stress levels according to their egress paths. The escape characteristics at various stages of fire development were studied as well. The results demonstrate that evacuation performance varies considerably depending on the severity of evacuees’ confronted fire hazard conditions, which emphasizes the importance of minimizing the pre-evacuation time in fire evacuation emergencies.

Indoor evacuation model based on visual-guidance artificial bee colony algorithm

Research on evacuation simulation and modeling is an important and urgent issue for emergency management.This paper presents an evacuation model based on cellular automata and social force to simulate the evacuation dynamics.Attractive force of target position,repulsive forces of individuals and obstacles,as well as congestion are considered in order to simulate the interaction among evacuees and the changing environment.A visual-guidance-based artificial bee colony algorithm is proposed to optimize the evacuation process.Each evacuee moves toward exits with the guidance of leading bee in his/her visual field.And leading bee is selected according to comprehensive factors including distance from the current individual,the number of obstacles and congestion,which avoids the randomness of roulette mechanism used by basic artificial bee colony algorithm.The experimental results indicate that the proposed model and algorithm can achieve effective performances for indoor evacuation problems with a large number of evacuees and obstacles,which accords with the actual evacuation situation.

Physics-based modeling of crowd evacuation in the Unity game engine

Crowds of people are often found in enclosed or constricted spaces.Evacuation in such situations is usually conducted calmly,but real or perceived danger may trigger panic.In panicked crowds,the interpersonal distance crowd members normally observe is often overwhelmed by the physical pressure of crowd members pushing against each other.That pressure can both slow evacuation and lead to injury or death.Models have been developed to study crowd evacuation in a range of situations.This paper describes the implementation,testing,and validation of a crowd evacuation model using Unity,a commercial computer game engine.A realistic physics-based model of crowd movement that calculates and considers the physical pressure crowd members exert on each other was implemented in Unity.The implemented model was tested under both nonpanicked and panicked scenarios;those tests exhibited known qualitative characteristics of such scenarios.The model was then quantitatively validated by comparing its results to the outcome of an actual evacuation event,the 2003 fire at The Station nightclub in Rhode Island.The implementation and validation show that Unity can be an effective tool for evacuation modeling.

Crowd evacuation simulation model with soft computing optimization techniques:a systematic literature review

Crowd evacuation simulation is an essential element when it comes to planning and preparation in evacuation management.This paper presents the survey based on systematic literature review(SLR)technique that aims to identify the crowd evacuation under microscopic model integrated with soft computing technique from previous works.In the review process,renowned databases were searched to retrieve the primary articles and total 38 studies were thoroughly studied.The researcher has identified the potential optimization factors in simulating crowd evacuation and research gaps based on acquired issues,limitation and challenges in this domain.The results of this SLR will serve as a guideline for the researchers that have same interest to develop better and effective crowd evacuation simulation model.The future direction from this SLR also suggests that there is a potential to hybrid the model with softcomputing optimization focusing on latest nature-inspired algorithms in improving the crowd evacuation model.

The prediction of exit choice using cumulative prospect value

Exit choice is essential for pedestrian safety and evacuation efficiency during the context of an emergency. Cumulative prospect theory is a widespread realistic decision-making theory that can transform choice outcomes and probabilities into subjective terms and integrate them as a parameter of cumulative prospect value (CPV), which determines the decision. The main contribution of this paper is the use of the CPV to predict exit choice. Furthermore, the different decision-making rules including Max, exponential(Expo), and Ratio (i.e., the three variable choice functions) were summarized and examined. This study used a confusion matrix to compare the predicted results with experimental data. Consequently, the parameters of Accuracy and F1-score showed that the predictions from Max and Expo were significantly more realistic while the results from Ratio were much more robust.