Influence factors on the passenger evacuation capacity of cruise ships: Modeling and simulation of full-scale evacuation incorporating information dissemination

The passenger evacuation capacity (PEC) of a cruise ship is a pivotal guarantee for quickly and safely evacuating all personnel on a damaged ship during an emergency. A general framework of the agent-based evacuation model is proposed in this study to simulate the entire process of cruise ship evacuation. The total evacuation time, duration of Level of Service (LOS) lower than E, effective flow rate of the escape route, density of the muster station, and usage rate of the lifeboat/life raft are used as the five evaluation indicators to quantify the PEC of cruise ships, thus providing a reference for the optimization analysis of evacuation procedures. With this framework, the PECs under different evacuation strategies of a cruise ship were evaluated in the context of ship heeling to capsizing for the Yangtze Gold 1. Evaluation results show that the increase of heeling angle when the evacuation order is issued does not affect the perception time of the first 90% of evacuees, but significantly increases the total evacuation time after more than 20°. Moreover, the degree of regional congestion is affected by several factors, including the assignment of muster stations, evacuation in batches, the place of obtaining life jackets, the heeling angle, the difference of escape route flows, and other factors. The results of this study provide PECs under different strategies as references for specific accident scenarios and evacuation targets.