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

In the make of a number of major maritime disasters and in the light of growth in the number of high density, high speed and large cruise ships, the analysis of evacuation process onboard passenger ship had gained increasing attention. A cellular automata (CA) model which adopts the findings on tenability analysis is proposed to simulate the evacuations from a multi-storey passenger ship. Two algorithms, direct and indirect algorithm can be used to model the multi-velocity cases. As research had shown, it will be more efficient to use indirect algorithm as the required time is ten times lesser than direct algorithm. Therefore, indirect algorithm will be used in this study. In order to obtain the average walking velocity of an individual on a leveled ground and up a stairway, experiments were conducted as the assembly area during an outbreak of fire onboard a ship is on the top deck. The experimental details and results are attached in Appendix A and B. In the numerical study, the effect of concentration of toxic potency on the survival duration and evacuation time was studied. The results show that the higher the concentration of toxic potency, the more critical the survival duration and the longer the evacuation time. However, the CA model can only be used in making comparisons between different design of evacuation scheme currently. The result obtained by the proposed CA model cannot be validated due to insufficient experimental information on human behaviour under emergency. Lastly, some recommendations were proposed by the author which may be helpful in the future works in relation to the topics.Bachelor of Science (Maritime Studies