Simulation of Aircraft Disembarking and Emergency Evacuation

In this paper we simulate the process of disembarking in a small airplane seat layout, based on Airbus A320/ Boeing 737, in search of ways to make it faster and safer under normal evacuation conditions, as well as emergency scenarios with the help of a model based on a parallel computational tool, namely Cellular Automata (CA). In specific, several case studies, including single and two opposite exits, different walking speeds of passengers depending on sex, age and height, the effect of retrieving and carrying luggage in addition to the presence of obstacles in the aisles, constituting a dynamic environment, as well as the emergence of panic are taken into account to enlighten the disembarking and emergency evacuation processes. The simulation results were compared to existing aircraft disembarking and evacuation times and indicate the efficacy of the proposed model to investigate and reveal the passenger attributes during these processes in all the examined cases. Finally, in order to speed up the simulation process and present a fully dynamical anticipative real-time system helpful for decision making we investigate the hardware implementation of the proposed here CA model in a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) device.