Experimental Study and Numerical Simulation of Evacuation in an Offshore Platform

With the rapid development of marine oil and gas exploitation, the evacuation of offshore platforms has received more attention. First, an experimental investigation of the evacuation process of 120 participants in a real offshore platform is performed, and then simulation results provided by Pathfinder are validated against the measurement results. Second, four typical evacuation scenarios on the platform referring to IMO guidelines are investigated by Pathfinder with the speed values achieved in experiments. The simulation results show that both the utilization of exits and evacuation efficiency of people on the offshore platform need to be further improved. Last, the evacuation routes of people under the four scenarios are optimized, and the improvement of the evacuation performance after the optimization is evaluated by several mathematical indicators. Final results show that the evacuation with the optimized route design prompts the use efficiency of exits and further reduces the evacuation time. The present study provides a useful advice for potentially revising the IMO guidelines in future and provides efficient evacuation strategies for planning the emergency evacuation on offshore platforms.