Validation of advanced evacuation analysis on passenger ships using experimental scenario and data of full-scale evacuation

• SIMPEV is one of the advanced evacuation software on the passenger ship.
• SIMPEV is applied to two validation datasets given by real evacuation experiments.
• SIMPEV satisfies the acceptance criteria for each datasets.
• SIMPEV gives better or almost equal results compared with other software.

Evacuation analysis, which calculates the total evacuation time should be fulfilled for all passenger ships. One of the ways to calculate evacuation time is to use the computer simulation, which models various effects of human behaviors in an emergency situation. In the previous research, SIMPEV (SIMulation system for Passenger EVacuation) was developed for the evacuation analysis based on the latest human behavior algorithms. It has already showed that SIMPEV basically satisfied the eleven test cases suggested in International Maritime Organization (IMO) Maritime Safety Committee (MSC)’s Circulation 1238. The main focus of this paper is the validation of SIMPEV by using “SAFEGUARD Validation Data Set 1 and 2”, which performed real evacuation trials in two full-scale ships to compare simulation data with experimental data. Total evacuation time is computed by SIMPEV based on the validation data sets such as drawings, initial distributions and end locations. The results from 50 times simulation are analyzed to be compared with the experimental data in the statistical methods. From the results, it is found that SIMPEV satisfies the acceptance criteria for each of data sets. Furthermore, the results show a close similarity to those of the other simulation programs.