  With the advance in living standard, cruise travel has been rapidly expanding
around the world in recent years. The transportation of passengers in water has
also made a rapid development. It is expected that ships will be more and more
widely used. Unfortunately, ship disasters occurred in these years caused
serious losses. It raised the concern on effectiveness of passenger evacuation
on ships. The present study thus focuses on pedestrian evacuation features on
ships. On ships, passenger movements are affected by the periodical water
motion and thus are quite different from the characteristic when walking on
static horizontal floor. Taking into consideration of this special feature, an
agent-based pedestrian model is formulized and the effect of ship swaying on
pedestrian evacuation efficiency is investigated. Results indicated that the
proposed model can be used to quantify the special evacuation process on ships.
