Evacuation Simulation
Current
Team:
Motivation
Conducting live exercises for evacuating thousands of people is generally impossible. A staged evacuation would necessarily miss crucial aspects of the required response (e.g. fear, confusion) on the part of both emergency personnel and evacuees, or the exercise would be considered unethical.
Description
Agent-level modeling is essential to creating realistic behaviors that a trainee needs to respond to in evacuation scenarios. We use BDI-style agents as has been done in existing literature, but augment this with a Social Comparison Theory (SCT) model. The key idea in SCT is that humans, lacking objective meeans to evaluate their state, compare themselves to others that are similar to them, and then take actions to reduce the differences found. This provides a psychological framework for commonly observed characteristics in crowds at the micro-level. Finally, we use Massive software to create compelling visualizations that will enhance training and policy-evaluation for evacuation authorities.
Collaboration
In addition to a cross-institutional team with members from the University of Southern California, the University of the Pacific, and Bar-Ilan University in Israel, we have also established collaboration with Massive Software. Massive has been used in dozens of commercial films over the past few years, beginning with the creation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy's epic-scale battle scenes as well as more recent uses in such films as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Dark Knight, X-men Origins: Wolverine, Ratatouille, John Woo's Red Cliff, to name but a few.
Publications:
Agent-based Evacuation Modeling: Simulating the Los Angeles International Airport
In Proceedings of the Workshop on Emergency Management: Incident, Resource, and Supply Chain Management (EMWS09), Irvine, CA, November 2009.
