A new simulation model for assessing aircraft emergency evacuation considering passenger physical characteristics

Yu Liu, Weijie Wang, Hong-Zhong Huang, Yanfeng Li and Yuanjian Yang

Reliability Engineering and System Safety, 2014, vol. 121, issue C, 187-197

Abstract: Conducting a real aircraft evacuation trial is oftentimes unaffordable as it is extremely expensive and may cause severe injury to participants. Simulation models as an alternative have been used to overcome the aforementioned issues in recent years. This paper proposes a new simulation model for emergency evacuation of civil aircraft. Its unique features and advantages over the existing models are twofold: (1) passengers' critical physical characteristics, e.g. waist size, gender, age, and disabilities, which impact the movement and egress time of individual evacuee from a statistical viewpoint, are taken into account in the new model. (2) Improvements are made to enhance the accuracy of the simulation model from three aspects. First, the staggered mesh discretization method together with the agent-based approach is utilized to simulate movements of individual passengers in an emergency evacuation process. Second, each node discretized to represent cabin space in the new model can contain more than one passenger if they are moving in the same direction. Finally, each individual passenger is able to change his/her evacuation route in a real-time manner based upon the distance from the current position to the target exit and the queue length. The effectiveness of the proposed simulation model is demonstrated on Boeing 767-300 aircraft.

Keywords: Aircraft emergency evacuation; Physical characteristics; Evacuation route; Fine network simulation model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reensy:v:121:y:2014:i:c:p:187-197

DOI: 10.1016/j.ress.2013.09.001

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