[Paper Review] Modeling pedestrian evacuation movement in a swaying ship

Juan Chen, Jian Ma+1 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Nov 15, 2015

Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics5 references3 citations

TL;DR

This study proposes an agent-based pedestrian evacuation model that explicitly simulates the effects of ship swaying on human movement dynamics. By incorporating inertial forces from periodic ship motion, the model quantifies how lateral swaying disrupts gait and slows evacuation, particularly when movement aligns with the swaying direction, resulting in longer evacuation times and curved trajectories in open areas.

ABSTRACT

With the advance in living standard, cruise travel has been rapidly expanding around the world in recent years. The transportation of passengers in water has also made a rapid development. It is expected that ships will be more and more widely used. Unfortunately, ship disasters occurred in these years caused serious losses. It raised the concern on effectiveness of passenger evacuation on ships. The present study thus focuses on pedestrian evacuation features on ships. On ships, passenger movements are affected by the periodical water motion and thus are quite different from the characteristic when walking on static horizontal floor. Taking into consideration of this special feature, an agent-based pedestrian model is formulized and the effect of ship swaying on pedestrian evacuation efficiency is investigated. Results indicated that the proposed model can be used to quantify the special evacuation process on ships.

Motivation & Objective

• To address the lack of simulation models that account for ship swaying effects on pedestrian movement during emergency evacuations.
• To investigate how ship motion—particularly lateral swaying—affects pedestrian gait, speed, and evacuation efficiency.
• To develop a computationally feasible agent-based model that captures forced pedestrian movement patterns under dynamic ship conditions.
• To evaluate the impact of ship swaying on total evacuation time and passenger assembly efficiency in realistic ship layouts.
• To provide a simulation tool for early-stage ship design to identify evacuation bottlenecks and improve safety planning.

Proposed method

• An agent-based model is developed where each pedestrian agent senses and responds to ship swaying through inertial forces.
• Ship swaying is modeled using time-varying amplitude $ B(t) $ and phase $ \varphi(t) = M \cdot \sin(t) $, representing periodic lateral motion.
• Pedestrian movement is driven by internal self-force $ F_e $, adjusted dynamically to counteract inertial forces from ship motion.
• The model integrates ship motion effects into pedestrian trajectory generation, simulating lateral deviations and speed fluctuations.
• Trajectories are simulated under varying conditions: no swaying vs. swaying parallel/perpendicular to movement direction.
• Evacuation scenarios with 60 passengers are simulated in a ship layout with open areas and narrow channels to assess real-world impacts.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 How does ship swaying affect individual pedestrian movement patterns, such as gait and trajectory shape?
• RQ2 What is the impact of the angle between pedestrian movement direction and ship swaying direction on evacuation speed and efficiency?
• RQ3 How does ship swaying influence the total time required for passenger evacuation to assembly points?
• RQ4 In what ways do spatial constraints (e.g., narrow channels) mitigate or amplify the effects of ship swaying on evacuation?
• RQ5 To what extent does ship swaying increase evacuation time compared to static conditions in realistic ship layouts?

Key findings

• Ship swaying induces lateral pedestrian movements, especially in open areas, causing curved trajectories instead of straight paths.
• When movement is aligned with the swaying direction, pedestrians experience periodic acceleration and deceleration, disrupting consistent speed.
• Evacuation time increases under swaying conditions due to gait disruption, even though the difference in total time is relatively small.
• Passengers in narrow channels are less affected by swaying due to physical constraints limiting lateral motion.
• The model demonstrates that ship swaying reduces evacuation efficiency, particularly for passengers in open zones where lateral movement is unimpeded.
• The simulated evacuation time provides a reliable estimate for evaluating ship interior design and identifying potential bottlenecks in emergency planning.