Abstract:
VELOS, which stands for “Virtual Environment for Life On Ships”, is a
multi-user VR system that aims to support designers, early in the design
process, to assess passenger and crew activities on ship and improve ship
design accordingly. VELOS functionalities provide design aids required for
both normal and hectic operational conditions. This has been accomplished
by integrating a broad range of software components in VELOS platform
which includes tools targeting geometric and VR modelling, crowd
microscopic modelling based on steering behaviours technology, as well as
communication interfaces with external computational software packages.
In the present work, we focus on the evacuation-specific functionality of
VELOS by enhancing it with passenger-grouping and crew-assistance
behaviour. This is mainly achieved by combining and extending steering
behaviours, already used within VELOS, for crowd modelling, as, e.g.,
Leader-Follow and Cohere behaviour. This enhancement allows simulating
the evacuation process more realistically and comparing results acquired for
the scenarios prescribed by the IMO, with and without the consideration of
grouping and crew-assistance behaviour.
Submission guide