Impact of IoT system imperfections and passenger errors on cruise ship evacuation delay

Cruise ships and other naval vessels include automated Internet of Things (IoT)-based evacuation systems for the passengers and crew to assist them in case of emergencies and accidents. The technical challenges of assisting passengers and crew to safety during emergencies include various aspects such as sensor failures, imperfections in the sound or display systems that are used to direct evacuees, the timely selection of optimum evacuation routes for the evacuees, as well as computation and communication delays that may occur in the IoT infrastructure due to intense activities during an emergency. In addition, during an emergency, the evacuees may be confused or in a panic, and may make mistakes in following the directions offered by the evacuation system. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to analyze the effect of two important aspects that can have an adverse effect on the passengers’ evacuation time, namely (a) the computer processing and communication delays, and (b) the errors that may be made by the evacuees in following instructions. The approach we take uses simulation with a representative existing cruise ship model, which dynamically computes the best exit paths for each passenger, with a deadline-driven Adaptive Navigation Strategy (ANS). Our simulation results reveal that delays in the evacuees’ reception of instructions can significantly increase the total time needed for passenger evacuation. In contrast, we observe that passenger behavior errors also affect the evacuation duration, but with less effect on the total time needed to evacuate passengers. These findings demonstrate the importance of the design of passenger evacuation systems in a way that takes into account all realistic features of the ship’s indoor evacuation environment, including the importance of having high-performance data processing and communication systems that will not result in congestion and communication delays.