VELOS: Crowd Modeling for Enhanced Ship Evacuation Analysis

Virtual Environment for Life On Ships VELOS is a multi-user Virtual Reality VR system that supports designers to assess early in the design process passenger and crew activities on a ship for both normal and hectic conditions of operations and to improve the ship design accordinglyi¾?[1]. Realistic simulations of behavioral aspects of crowd in emergency conditions require modeling of panic aspects and social conventions of inter-relations. The present paper provides a description of the enhanced crowd modeling approach employed in VELOS for the performance of ship evacuation assessment and analysis based on the guidelines provided by IMO's Circular MSC 1238/2007i¾?[2].