Modeling and Simulation of the Evacuation Process of Passenger Ships

The need to safely evacuate within very short time a large number of people from a confined space, such as the superstructure of large passenger ships, is a difficult task of great practical interest, as documented in recent discussions at the Marine Safety Committee of the International Maritime Organisation (MSC-IMO). This paper describes the methodology utilized by the code EVDEMON (EVacuation DEmonstration & MOdeliNg), currently under development at SDL-NTUA, for the simulation of the evacuation process onboard passenger ships and presents typical results of application to the evacuation of a modern RoRo passenger ferry. The code is understood as a design tool assisting the designer in the early design stage as to the consideration of proper arrangements for enabling a timely and safe evacuation. The designer is asked to care of optimal measures in terms of internal arrangements to allow for the fast evacuation without bottlenecks, when the ship is in danger. Given the uncertainty of human behavior under stress and the restrictions of a possible mathematical modeling thereof, only multiple simulations of different evacuation scenarios may give the naval architect an indication about the potential outcome in such an event, so that bottlenecks can be identified and removed to the extent possible. At a later development stage, namely after the validation phase, simulation codes, like the presented one, might be used as evidence for the approval of evacuation plans by relevant authorities, as documented by MSC-IMO (MSC Circ. 909/ 1999).