Abstract
The residential comfort and safety on ship are more focused than ever, in accordance with the increase of the crews' onboard time and interest in cruiser sailing. To grasp the safety characteristics on ships against various scenarios of evacuations, this study performed experiments and simulations for the evacuation times on a training ship. Through the experiments, the average walking speed is 3.0m/s on 100% visibility, and 1.2m/s on 8% visibility, but the speeds go down 1.3m/s and 0.7m/s, respectively, when obstacles are happened without any previous notification. From the simulation, it is clearly reconfirmed that the worse visibility and many people make evacuation time comparatively longer. And unlike the common expectation of the effect of emergency announcement, the difference of evacuation times between cases of announcement and non-announcement is negligible on this study. From the survey after experiments, it is known that experiment participants feel unsafe and fear when the evacuation routes are longer in bad visible condition, even if they know the perfect evacuation route. And the survey results also show that the evacuees give more careful consideration to make a evacuation route decision under bad visibility.