A ship evacuation model considering the interaction between pedestrians based on cellular automata

Abstract

This paper proposes the CAIE (cellular automata with interaction effect) model to evaluate ship passenger evacuation capability. The CAIE model simulates the interaction between passengers by establishing the friction and repulsive force model between passengers, derives the formula of the desired velocity's effect on the movement ability, reflects the influence of a high-density environment on the movement velocity of personnel, and defines push-crossing behavior rules to simulate opposite-flow movement. The proposed CAIE model is verified by passenger evacuation simulation experiments in single-exit cabins under the condition of opposite passenger traffic. The results demonstrate that the CAIE model has similar passenger movement rules as the social force model in terms of the arching and faster-is-slower phenomena. The results also show that the CAIE model meets the test requirements for the MSC.1/Circ.1533 communication of the advanced evacuation simulation model. Finally, the evacuation simulation analysis is performed on a small polar cruise ship using the CAIE model, Pathfinder software, and Maritime Exodus software. The comparison results indicate that the simulation results of the three models and their distributions of evacuation time are consistent. Therefore, the proposed CAIE model can be used to evaluate the evacuation ability of ships.