Evacuation of Vessels in Dockyards: A Model Validation Study

Evacuation modelling is continuously open to new scenarios and applications. This study examines the possibility to simulate and predict the evacuation of workers aboard vessels in dockyards. First, we provide new data for a better understanding and quantification of workers' evacuation performance. Second, we use an existing model (STEPS) and apply a validation protocol from the observed evacuation of 150 workers during an unannounced evacuation drill of a Ro-Pax ferry during the repair period in a dry dock. Despite the uncertainty of initial conditions to configure the scenario, the model accurately represents the observed evacuation (e.g. functional analysis ERD = 0.08; EPC = 1; SC = 0.89) suggesting that current agent-based evacuation models, with appropriate inputs and small adaptations, could be applied to these new challenging scenarios. Overall, this study provides evidence for this new application opportunity to model developers, model users and the research community and promotes the use of evacuation modelling for assessing fire safety in shipyards.