Effects of human behaviour on the modelling of fire evacuation in a multi-storey passenger ship

Due to previous catastrophes involving a large number of fatalities on passenger ships, simulation of evacuation in a passenger ship is attracting more and more attention. A cellular automata (CA) model, which adopts the findings of human behaviour exhibited by passengers, is proposed to simulate the emergency evacuation in a multi-storey passenger ship. CA has been successfully applied to simulate various complex systems, such as traffic flow and fluids. It has also been introduced to the simulation of pedestrian flow and the success motivates researchers to further extend CA to emergency evacuation since both areas are similar. This report aims to study the effects of human behaviour on evacuation in a multi-storey passenger ship. In order to conduct a more reasonable simulation, group behaviour exhibited by human beings is taken into account in the modelling. At every time step, each occupant will determine the movement direction by considering two factors, spatial distance and occupant density. Two algorithms, direct algorithm and indirect algorithm, can be used to model the behaviour of a crowd consisting of groups and individuals with different movement velocities during evacuation. As earlier research work [1] has shown, the indirect algorithm is more efficient as the required time is much lesser than the direct algorithm. Therefore, in this study, the indirect algorithm is used. Experiments were conducted at two locations, namely on a flat ground and up a staircase, to collect the movement velocities with respect to an individual and a group. Their movement velocities are then incorporated into the proposed CA model. Currently, this CA model can be used in an emergency evacuation on a multi-storey passenger ship. Even though credible, the results obtained by the proposed CA model cannot be validated due to the lack of experimental information of human behaviours. Hence, real tests on actual human evacuation on a passenger ship should be one of the most important future works.Bachelor of Science (Maritime Studies