Evacuation Simulation of a Passenger Ship Fire Based on a Modified Cellular Automaton

Abstract

AbstractThis study proposes a modified cellular automaton to simulate passenger ship fire evacuation. A fire dynamics simulator (FDS) is used to simulate the firing process for the passenger ship. The generated carbon monoxide (CO) concentration, temperature, and visibility are converted into equivalent lengths and input to the equivalent field of the modified cellular automaton. The fire field is applied to keep the evacuees away from the fire. And game theory is adopted to solve the conflict in the choice of route for evacuees. With or without fire on the passenger ship, three different evacuees’ densities are used to study the influence of different proportions of evacuees who are familiar with exits during the evacuation time. The positions of exits are also studied. The results show that when the fire release rate increases from 3000 to 8000 kW s−2 for the same evacuation scenario, the earliest time that evacuees are in danger is 50% earlier. The impact of fire on evacuees is greater than that of evacuees’ density. In the case of two close exits or exits close to the bulkheads, the congestion near exits is obvious and has the greatest effect on the evacuation time of the high evacuees’ density.