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.