Analysis of Human Competitive Behavior on an Inclined Ship

Abstract

When a ship accident occurs, emergency evacuation of passengers in a shorter time is one of the most effective means of reducing casualties. However, in addition to the ship inclination, the efficiency of the emergency evacuation can be affected by human behavior (e.g., competitive behavior), which affects human moving speed. Therefore, to analyze the impact of competitive behavior during ship evacuations, a dynamic evaluation system is developed to measure nested competitive behavior. Firstly, the perceived area is obtained by dividing the pedestrian visual perspective, which is used to calculate crowd density at every time step. Secondly, fuzzy logic is used to calculate the real-time competitive degree based on the inclined angle and crowd density, integrated into the human evacuation model as an input parameter to update competitive behavior. Finally, this study analyzes and evaluates evacuation time and efficiency with different proportions of competitive people at different inclined angles, using a dining room on a ship as a case study. The results show that without ship inclination, the total evacuation time decreases with an increase of the proportion of competitive people as more competitive people can accelerate the evacuation process. However, the inclination of a ship leads to a decrease in human walking speed, congestion at the exit, and a slower overall evacuation process. According to the findings of this study, an appropriate increase in the proportion of competitive humans is beneficial to the efficiency of emergency evacuation, while strengthening the guidance at the exit will also reduce the evacuation time.