Title: Design and development of a game-engine-based simulator specialised on ships evacuation

Authors: George Kougioumtzoglou; Anastasios Theodoropoulos; Georgios Lepouras

Addresses: HCI-VR Laboratory, University of Peloponnese, Greece ' HCI-VR Laboratory, University of Peloponnese, Greece ' HCI-VR Laboratory, University of Peloponnese, Greece

Abstract: Modern ships have become larger in scale and function, and their complexity has increased considerably. This brings up many difficulties in evacuation and rescue when an emergency occurs. Therefore, effective evacuation and risk methods should be predicted and applied to design, safety training, and education. We have developed a three-dimensional ship evacuation simulator (SES) facilitating the impersonation of evacuees by computer-controlled autonomous bots (agents) that perform risk assessment and continuously calculate route conditions, communicate with neighbouring occupants, determine bottleneck points, and select the best evacuation routes. In this study, we introduce the simultaneous participation of human users and computer-controlled bots as evacuees in gamified multiplayer scenarios by the runtime spawning of 3D elements such as fire and smoke. SES is a game-engine-based simulator with several benefits such as flexible technology and economic feasibility. We believe that realistic and valid results can be obtained by applying SES in evacuation simulation.

Keywords: lightweight simulator; passenger ship; evacuation model; crowd simulation; human-computer interaction; virtual engineering; intelligent agent; evacuation simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHFMS.2022.124274

International Journal of Human Factors Modelling and Simulation, 2022 Vol.7 No.3/4, pp.301 - 328

Received: 09 May 2020
Accepted: 09 Sep 2020
Published online: 21 Jul 2022 *