Emergency Evacuation Simulation For Large Civil Aircraft And Evacuaton Guiding System Optimization

As the evacuation time of civil aircraft in emergency conditions is an indispensableindicator of aircraft security, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires that allpassengers and crew should be evacuated from an aircraft to the ground within90seconds under simulated emergency conditions. However, conducting a real egress trailis oftentimes unaffordable as it is extremely expensive and may cause severe injury toparticipants. With the development of simulation technology, evacuation simulationmodels as an alternative have been used to overcome the aforementioned issues inrecent years. However, the accuracy of simulation results strongly lies on the accuracyof simulation model in terms of characterizing evacuation environment and behaviors ofevacuees in real evacuation. Financially supported by the National Natural ScienceFoundation of China under contact no.61179059, this thesis dedicates to emulate thereal-life situation and improve the simulation performance. The unique feathers andcontributions of this thesis are listed as follows:(1) Development of the deck simulator based on the mixed coarse-fine networksimulation model. The proposed coarse-fine network is utilized to create the decksimulator. On this basis, a free networks sequential numbering method is used togenerate the evacuation map for each exit. All virtual passengers can move along theaircraft cabin by comparing evacuation maps of different exits. The new modelovercomes the limitation that each cell in cabin network is only allowed to be occupiedby one passenger to avoid the overlap between passengers in existing evacuationmodels.(2) Development of the virtual passenger model which has different physicalattributes (such as waist circumference, gender, age and disability) and ability ofplanning escape route independently. The physical attributes of randomly generatedvirtual passengers have the same statistical distribution with that of real air travelers. Anew route selection strategy, in which each individual passenger is able to changehis/her evacuation route in a real-time manner based upon the distance from currentposition to target exit and the length of queue, is developed. (3) Study of evacuation guiding system to improve the evacuation efficiency ofaircrafts. The evacuation guiding system is optimized under various emergencyconditions by utilizing surrogate model and sequential sampling method. Asdemonstrated in the case studies, the guiding system can greatly reduce blind evacuationbehaviors in actual evacuation process and significantly increase the efficiency ofaircraft emergency evacuation.