Abstract
A cruise ship is a large public place, and it is very important to ensure the safety of passengers during the evacuation process in case of an emergency. This paper proposes a method to improve evacuation efficiency on cruise ships by controlling passengers’ density. According to the construction of the staircase, the space of the staircase is divided into the step and landing areas. On the basis of considering the influence of passengers’ view field and moving characteristics of passengers, the moving rules of passengers in two areas are established. Taking staircases of the cruise ship as the evacuation scenario, the evacuation process is simulated by using the established model. From simulation results, it is found that numbers of evacuated passengers between staircases are very unbalanced and too many passengers gather in one staircase, which lead to serious congestion. By controlling passengers’ density in stairs areas, the minimum evacuation time is the optimization objective and the optimization model is established by using the quantum-inspired evolutionary algorithm and genetic algorithm. The optimization results show that the evacuation time is significantly shortened when the passenger’s density on the staircase is kept within an appropriate range, which proves that the evacuation efficiency can be effectively improved by controlling the passengers’ density.
Highlights
A cruise ship is a multistorey structure, and staircases are the main vertical evacuation channels connecting between decks
In order to obtain the characteristics of the staircase evacuation process, many researchers studied the staircase evacuation by experiments and simulations
Zeng et al [2] modified the optimal steps model [3] and studied the process of pedestrian evacuation on the stair platform. ey found that when the corridor was connected to the platform on the opposite side of the incoming stairs, this structure was conducive to the evacuation of pedestrians on the stairs
Summary
A cruise ship is a multistorey structure, and staircases are the main vertical evacuation channels connecting between decks. Zeng et al [19, 20] investigated the impact of initial pedestrians’ distribution between different floors and illumination in the stairwell area during pedestrian evacuation, and found that merging behavior would slow down the moving speed of pedestrians on upper floors. Ding et al [22] considered the impact of the merging behavior on stair evacuation, and carried out evacuation simulations of different initial distributions of pedestrians on five floors. Ma et al [26, 27] applied the extended social force model to study the influence of guidance on pedestrian evacuation simulation, and the simulation result showed that guidance could improve evacuation efficiency when the pedestrian density of the neighborhood field was moderate.
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