Effects of Different Evacuation Organization Strategies on Emergency Evacuation Characteristics in Cruise Ship Fire Scenarios

Cruise ship fire evacuation is affected not only by fire product spread, but also by how evacuation information is delivered and how passenger flow is organized. However, existing fire evacuation studies have mainly focused on fire products or individual occupant characteristics, while the effects of evacuation organization strategies under dynamic fire conditions, especially in cruise ship environments, remain insufficiently investigated. Therefore, this study designs and compares three evacuation strategies representing different levels of information availability and organizational coordination: a static signage strategy, in which passengers mainly follow predefined evacuation signs; a system warning strategy, in which passengers adjust routes according to threshold-triggered risk information; and a centralized diversion strategy, in which passenger flow is coordinated across zones based on global risk and congestion information. The strategies are evaluated under representative cruise ship fire scenarios. The results show that static signage does not account for the dynamic influence of fire products on the evacuation environment, while system warning strategy provides relatively limited improvement in evacuation performance because of its threshold-triggered mechanism. In contrast, centralized diversion improves evacuation safety by redistributing passenger flow and reducing local congestion, achieving a 98.53% evacuation success rate and reducing the average cumulative congestion time to 4.1159 s in the galley fire scenario.