A survey of crowd evacuation on passenger ships: Recent advances and future challenges

Abstract

During ship emergencies, a reliable and efficient evacuation system is able to guide passengers to the appropriate muster stations as quickly as possible. The majority of the existing indoor evacuation systems provide emergency guidance for people trapped in general buildings. However, those systems fail to consider the unique challenges of ship passenger evacuation, such as the effect of ship motion on pedestrian motion and the feedback of pedestrian motion on ship inclination state. Consequently, evacuation guidance provided by these schemes may not always be optimal or may even make the evacuation worse due to the differences in the critical factors influencing emergency guiding between land-based buildings and passenger ships. This paper presents a systematic literature overview of recent advances in building evacuation, followed by a description of the challenges unique to evacuating passengers on vessels. Furthermore, the existing ship evacuation research is reviewed from three aspects, i.e., passenger behavior study, ship evacuation optimization, and evaluation of evacuation on passenger ships. A discussion of land-based evacuation schemes and prospects for ship evacuation is also presented.