An uncertainty analysis method for passenger travel time under ship fires: A coupling technique of nested sampling and polynomial chaos expansion method. (1st January 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Xie, Qimiao; Wang, Pengcheng; Li, Shanshan; Wang, Jinhui; Lo, Siuming; Wang, Weili
• Is Part Of: Ocean engineering. Volume 195(2020)
• Publication Date: 2020-01-01
• Subjects: Ship fires -- Evacuation time -- Travel time -- Safety factor -- Polynomial chaos expansion -- Surrogate model; Ocean engineering -- Periodicals; Ocean engineering; Periodicals; 620.4162
• DOI: 10.1016/j.oceaneng.2019.106604
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0029-8018

Abstract

Abstract: Passenger evacuation under ship fires is very complex and largely uncertain. For ship design, conducting an uncertainty analysis of passenger travel time requires a large number of evacuation simulations, which is very time-consuming. This work proposed a new method to quantify the uncertainty of passenger travel time based on a surrogate model, which is constructed by the polynomial chaos expansion with the nested sampling technique. To illustrate the application of the proposed method, a case of a 3-storey passenger ship with different functional zones is presented. The results demonstrated that the proposed method can be employed to quantify passenger travel time uncertainty with the acceptable accuracy. Specifically, travel time approximately follows the normal distribution under uniform distributions of input parameters. Safety factor of travel time cannot be regarded as a deterministic value, while it is significantly affected by its safety level. The parametric sensitivity analysis results suggested that for restaurant and retail zone the initial passenger density plays a leading role in the safety evacuation compared with other zones, while it is ignorable for bar zone and general area. This surrogate-based uncertainty analysis method of travel time can provide a tool to facilitate passenger evacuation design under ship fires. Highlights: An uncertainty analysis method is proposed for passenger travel time. The parametric sensitivity of travel time is addressed. Safety factor of travel time is variable and determined by its safety level. The sensitivity of travel time to passenger density depends on evacuation area and exit width.