Rapid Crowd Evacuation for Passenger Ships Using LPWAN

An emerging evacuation path planning technique that uses Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) to enable real-time danger prediction and user-oriented path planning can ensure the safe and timely navigation of evacuees in complex scenarios such as cruise ships. However, most existing LPWAN-based evacuation models assume pedestrians’ walking speed remains constant and ignore crowd congestion in corridors before exits, which is not appropriate for rocking ships. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes a congestion-relived guiding framework with dedicated path planning for emergency evacuation on passenger ships. The basic idea is to averagely minimize the total evacuation time while meeting the deadline for ship capsizing under all circumstances by selecting uncrowded paths for each passenger individually. First, we use probability distributions rather than constant numbers to represent walking time (also called delay) along passageways. A worst-case delay bound with a high level of trustworthiness is also estimated for each passageway under the boundary condition of ship capsizing. Next, we predict the congestion of corridors by modeling the spatiotemporal movement of passengers, and then distribute evacuation loads evenly among corridors to alleviate the congestion. The total expected evacuation time of all corridors is finally minimized based on the delay probability distribution and estimated congestion, and the deadline for ship evacuation under all circumstances is met with the worst-case delay bound. Simulation results show that our approach significantly reduces the total escaping time of crowd evacuation by 45% and 34% while improving the navigation success ratio by more than 20% and 80% compared with the state-of-the-art emergency evacuation systems, namely the look-up table guiding scheme and the group-based guiding evacuation scheme, respectively.