Investigating the Strategy on Path Planning on Aircraft Evacuation Process Using Discrete Event Simulation

Abstract

Federal Regulation has suggested that all passengers in the airplane should finish the evacuation within 90 s. This research applied a Discrete Event Simulation (DES) model to investigate passengers’ evacuation paths and decision-making processes for aircraft evacuation under emergency. ARENA® 14 was used on an Airbus A380 cabin configuration with capacity of 538 as the baseline model. Total evacuation time and the congestion conditions of each gate were used as a measure for the evacuation process. The baseline model was validated using a real world A380 certification evacuation drill. An experiment was conducted based on the modification of the baseline model to investigate the effect of different path planning strategies on total evacuation time. Results suggested that a flight attendant directed approach yielded significantly more efficiency than passenger random exit choosing and switching exits. Practical implications and future study were given at the end of the paper to consider a more realistic and dynamics simulation approach to address this problem.