Impact of Network Delay and Decision Imperfections in IoT Assisted Cruise Ship Evacuation

Major challenges of assisting passengers to safely and quickly escape from ships when an emergency occurs, include complex realistic features such as human behavior uncertainty, dynamic human traversal times, and the computation and communication delays in the systems that offer advice to users during an emergency. In this paper, we present simulations that examine the influence of these key features on evacuation performance in terms of evacuation time. The approach is based on our previously proposed lookup table-based ship passenger evacuation method, i.e., ANT. The simulation results we present show that delays in the users' reception of instructions significantly impair the effectiveness of the evacuation service. In contrast, behavior uncertainty has a weaker influence on the performance of the navigation method. In addition, these effects also vary with the extent of the behavior uncertainty, the dynamics of the traversal time distributions, and the delay in receiving directions. These findings demonstrate the importance of carefully designing evacuation systems for passenger ships in a way that takes into account all realistic features of the ship's indoor evacuation environment, including the crucial role of information technology.