Use of VELOS platform for modeling and assessing crew assistance and passenger grouping in ship-evacuation analysis

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 modeling, crowd microscopic modeling based on steering behaviors 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 behavior. This is mainly achieved by combining and extending steering behaviors, already used within VELOS, for crowd modeling, as, e.g., Leader-Follow and Cohere behavior. This enhancement allows to simulate the evacuation process more realistically and compare results acquired for the scenarios prescribed by the IMO, with and without the consideration of grouping and crew-assistance behavior.