ANT: Deadline-Aware Adaptive Emergency Navigation Strategy for Dynamic Hazardous Ship Evacuation With Wireless Sensor Networks

Yuting Ma,Kezhong Liu,Jie Ma,Kehao Wang,Xuming Zeng,Mozi Chen,Cong Liu

doi:10.1109/access.2020.3011545

Abstract

Efficient and safe ship evacuation strategy plays a critical role in protecting passengers' lives when ships encounter accidents. Existing wireless sensor network (WSN)-based emergency navigation methods mainly consider the dynamics of hazards and accordingly plan evacuation paths to minimize human exposure to the environmental hazards, such as fire and smoke. However, without sufficient consideration of the ship capsizing time and the impact of dynamic ship inclination on the passengers' walking speed, these methods may fail to evacuate passengers before the deadline. In this paper, we propose ANT, a deadline-aware adaptive emergency navigation strategy for dynamic hazardous ship evacuation with WSNs, which informs each passenger about a hazard-avoided evacuation path to successfully reach lifeboats within the specified deadline under all circumstances. To achieve this aim, ANT analyzes the process of ship capsizing to predict the specific limited evacuation time and the worst-case traversal delay. Next, an online evacuation path planning strategy is proposed based on a real-time adaptive routing algorithm to maximize navigation efficiency while ensuring user safety. We evaluate ANT by conducting prototype experiments and extensive simulations. The results demonstrate that ANT improves the navigation success ratio by 40% and 5%, compared with state-of-the-art emergency navigation systems, namely, medial axis-based approach and ENO-based oscillation-free emergency navigation approach, respectively.

Highlights

Guarantee of the safety of passengers and crew of ships has received considerable attention since the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea was introduced by the International Maritime Organization [1]
As ship environmental hazards are dynamic and passengers are unfamiliar with the complex ship structure, accidents occurring in recent years (e.g., Costa Concordia disaster in 2012 [2]) have
The results demonstrate that ANT improves the navigation success ratio by 40% and 5%, compared with state-of-the-art emergency navigation systems, namely, medial axis-based (MA) approach and OPEN, respectively

Summary

Introduction

Guarantee of the safety of passengers and crew of ships has received considerable attention since the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea was introduced by the International Maritime Organization [1]. As ship environmental hazards are dynamic and passengers are unfamiliar with the complex ship structure, accidents occurring in recent years (e.g., Costa Concordia disaster in 2012 [2]) have. Recent advances in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have shown the potential of sensing hazards in the physical world and an in-situ interaction between people and the environment. The use of WSNs to explore dynamic environmental hazards and provide a real-time navigation service to users has garnered increasing attention. To improve passenger safety during evacuation, significant efforts have been made to propose various WSN-assisted.

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