Analysis of the Impact of Small Group Behavior on Cruise Ship Emergency Evacuation

The effectiveness of a cruise ship’s emergency evacuation is greatly influenced by the way people interact; this paper uses the social force model to simulate two different evacuation scenarios considering the impact of small groups. It uses an agent to simulate the behavior of a single occupant, and leverages the social force model to quantify the effect of group behavior on the group members. According to the influence of the group on the members, this paper corrects the expected speed of the members to determine the speed of crowd evacuation. It uses the SAFEGUARD cruise ship as the evacuation platform to simulate the process of evacuating the passengers to the boarding station and assembly station, respectively, and calculates the evacuation time, congestion area, and congestion duration of passengers under the action of groups. The simulation results of the two scenarios show that the group effect increases the average evacuation time by 15.29% and 21.79%, and increases the average detour distance by 24.54% and 17.89%, respectively.