• Journal of the Society of Naval Architects of Korea
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• v.50 no.5
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• pp.307-313
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• 2013

This paper presents a simulation for passenger ship evacuation considering determination of evacuating direction based on walking direction potential function. In order to determine walking direction of a passenger, his/her position in two dimensional plane was adopted as a design variable, and fixed boundaries such as walls and obstacles were adopted as constraints. To solve this optimum problem, a walking direction potential function was adopted as an objective function. This potential function was configured as a kind of penalty function and it contained two components. One is a potential function concerned with the distance to the destination, and other is a potential function based on the effect of walls and obstacles. To determine evacuating direction, this problem was solved by minimizing the walking direction potential function every unit time during the simulation. The crowd behavior of the passenger consisted of the flock behavior, a form of collective behavior of a large number of interacting passengers with a common group. With the proposed algorithm, the test problems in International Maritime Organization, Maritime Safety Committee/Circulation 1238(IMO MSC/Circ.1238) were implemented and the direction of passengers and total evacuation time was analyzed.