Research on Dynamic Route Planning for Emergency Evacuation of Passenger Ships Considering Fire Spread

To improve emergency response efficiency in passenger ship fire accidents and ensure the life safety of passengers and crew, this paper proposes a dynamic route planning model for passenger ship fire evacuation that accounts for fire spread. Firstly, a passenger ship fire spread model is established based on the field simulation theory, and an emergency evacuation network model is constructed by determining the evacuation network topology from the fire propagation process. Secondly, the factors affecting emergency evacuation route planning during fire spread are analyzed, and a multi-objective optimization model for dynamic evacuation routes is developed. Thirdly, an improved ant colony optimization algorithm is designed to solve the problem. Finally, using the RP1 vessel from the publicly available ship evacuation dataset of the EU Seventh Framework Program SAFEGUARD project as a case study, simulation and comparative experiments are conducted. The results show that, in medium- and large-scale evacuation problems, the proposed method consistently maintains higher computational efficiency compared with the DABD algorithm and the FOA. In terms of objective optimization, it demonstrates that the proposed method has better effectiveness and feasibility than the shortest-path evacuation strategy, as it minimizes evacuation cost while satisfying assembly station capacity constraints and achieves a more balanced utilization of all emergency exits.