People Evacuation from Passenger Ships: Development of Computer Model

Description

The Hong Kong Kai Tak Cruise Terminal was opened in early 2013 and is a hub for cruise ships providing a gateway from Hong Kong to many Asia cities. With the rapid growth of economy and cruise ship travel, there will have a great many large passenger and cruise ships traveling to and from Hong Kong and in the Asia region. In view of the demand for pleasure voyages, larger and larger vessels are now sailing on the sea. It is not uncommon to have ships over two hundred thousand tons accommodating several thousand passengers. On the other hands, we cannot assure a zero risk situation and cruise ship accident, such as the Costa Concordia causing over 50 fatalities, has happened in recent years. In order to mitigate the ill effect of an emergency, evacuating the passengers from the ships will be necessary. The Costa Concordia accident required total evacuation of over 4,000 passengers from the ship. Studying the evacuation process and establishing appropriate strategies will be important to ship manufacturers, management companies as well as the government. Escaping from a large cruise and passenger ship may not be the same as in a building. Evacuting in confined space, narrower exits, listing, heeling and unlevelled routes, upward escape or even swinging escape routes and lifeboat operation may need to be considered for ship evacuation. The project aims at developing an integrated model incorporating agent-based and network sub-models to simulate the evacuation process in ships. Simulated experiments will be performed to study the gait patterns of evacuees in confined space, listing, heeling and swinging routes. As there may have a large number of aged and retired people to travel in cruise ships, the movement and safety of individuals with mobility impairments is something we are very much interested in studying as well. The information gathered will serve to calibrate the computer model and various ship evacuation strategies will be studied and to provide insights to cruise ship management as well as relevant government authorities.