Game Engines for Assessment and Safety Training

Abstract

The safe evacuation of passenger ships is a major issue for the marine industry. Methods such as Evacuation Drills and Simulations have been tested. Τhey may provide reliable data, but their insufficient repeatability, their excessive cost, and their duration, reduces their value (Klüpfel et al., 2001; Johnson, 2006). Nevertheless, the evacuation drills provide reliable results, involving humans as evacuees, while introducing the Human Behavior into the evacuation process. To overcome some of the previously mentioned issues, computerized Serious Games Evacuation Simulators have been proposed, although they usually do not allow the participation of human evacuees and their focus is the validation of existing models and safety standards, as well as the definition of the evacuation processes. This problem has been overcome with the development of 3D evacuation simulators, but most of them lack authentic human behavior in dangerous situations. In this work, it is proposed to alleviate these shortcomings by training the evacuees, and in this case the passenger of liner ships, by using the Unreal 4 Game Engine to develop a 3D Multiplayer Gamified Ship Evacuation Serious Game/Simulator with the name Ship Evacuation Simulator (SES). On top of the 3D multiplayer environment, the simultaneous participation of computer-controlled (bots) and human-controlled evacuees is implemented while Gamification and Edutainment principles are introduced, to motivate and immerse the users in the virtual environment and behave similarly to real evacuees. The model that implements Human Behavior, to the computer-controlled bots, is a combination of the Affiliation and the Protective Action Decision Models, whereas the Models that implement their movement are AI-based. The simulation sessions are conducted in a fully three-dimensional environment under the supervision of an administrator, while the users join as evacuees. An administrator sets up the options of every session and can intervene in real-time, spawning elements and events or changing variables of the simulation. SES constitutes a lightweight and flexible prototype framework for testing Passenger Ships on safety standards and for training purposes, which may be easily implemented to different ship types with minimal modifications, as a novel approach focused primarily on the particularities of Greek shipping, whereas it can be applied to any environment. This work is aspires to evaluate the Game Engines as development environments for the development of Evacuation Simulators, to validate the results by comparing the results of SES with real evacuation incidents and other experimental data, to estimate the effects of the concurrent participation of human players with computer-controlled bots, and to assess the application of SES to the marine industry, towards the training of passenger and the improvement of safety in sea travel, increasing the repeatability of the serious games/simulations, while maintaining a degree of realistic behavior.