Agent Based Disaster Evacuation Assistance System
Abstract
This paper proposes a system that supports people being evacuated effectively from dangerous situations by using multi-agent cooperation. The main feature of this system is that it does not require central servers. The system uses the mobile devices of evacuees (e.g. phones, mobile PCs, tablets) and performs distributed calculations while assessing the locations of evacuees. By using this system, the evacuees are able to know the appropriate evacuation timing. This paper focuses on the formalization of the disaster evacuation problem and how to solve it using the framework of the Distributed Constraint Optimization Problem (DCOP). In order to evaluate this system, an experiment was carried out using multi-agent simulation. The result of the experiment showed that, for the case where the evacuees can receive evacuation guidance from this system, the evacuation completion time for all evacuees (in the case) was about 10% - 30% less than in the case where this system is not used.
References
CabinetOffice, Disaster Management In Japan. Government of Japan, 2011. [Online]. Available: http://www.bousai.go.jp/1info/pdf/saigaipanf_e.pdf
A. R. Leite, F. Enembreck, and J.-P. A. Barthes, “Distributed constraint optimization problems: Review and perspectives,” Expert Systems with Applications, vol. 41, no. 11, pp. 5139 – 5157, 2014.
K. Iizuka, Y. Iizuka, and K. Yoshida, “A real-time disaster situation mapping system for university campuses,” in Online Communities and Social Computing, ser. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, A. Ozok and P. Zaphiris, Eds. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg, 2011, vol. 6778, pp. 40–49.
A. Fujihara and H. Miwa, “Effect of traffic volume in real-time disaster evacuation guidance using opportunistic communications,” in Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems (INCoS), 2012 4th International Conference on, Sept 2012, pp.457–462.
D. T. Nguyen, W. Yeoh, and H. C. Lau, “Stochastic dominance in stochastic dcops for risk-sensitive applications,” in Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems-Volume 1. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2012, pp. 257–264.
W. Zhang, G. Wang, Z. Xing, and L. Wittenburg, “Distributed stochastic search and distributed breakout: properties, comparison and applications to constraint optimization problems in sensor networks,” Artif. Intell., no. 161, pp. 55–87, 2005.
S. Fitzpatrick and L. Meertens, “An experimental assessment of a stochastic, anytime, decentralized, soft colourer for sparse graphs,” in 1st Symposium on Stochastic Algorithms: Foundations and Applications, 2001, pp. 49–64.
C. M. Macal and M. J. North, “Tutorial on agent-based modeling and simulation,” in Proceedings of the 37th Conference on Winter Simulation, ser. WSC ’05. Winter Simulation Conference, 2005, pp. 2–15.
C. Burstedde, K. Klauck, A. Schadschneider, and J. Zittartz, “Simulation of pedestrian dynamics using a two-dimensional cellular automaton,” Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, vol. 295, no. 3, pp. 507–525, 2001.
D. Helbing, I. Farkas, and T. Vicsek, “Simulating dynamical features of escape panic,” Nature, vol. 407, no. 6803, pp. 487–490, 2000.
J. Shi, A. Ren, and C. Chen, “Agent-based evacuation model of large public buildings under fire conditions,” Automation in Construction, vol. 18, no. 3, pp. 338–347, 2009.
T. Kaneda and D. Okayama, “A pedestrian agent model using relative coordinate systems,” in Agent-Based Approaches in Economic and Social Complex Systems IV. Springer, 2007, pp. 63–70.
K. Iizuka and Y. Iizuka, “Consideration of behavioral psychological issues for the mobile evacuation guidance systems,” in The Inaugural Asian Conference on the Social Sciences and Sustainability, 2014, pp. 109–114.
R. N. Lass, J. B. Kopena, E. A. Sultanik, D. N. Nguyen, C. P. Dugan, P. J. Modi, and W. C. Regli, “Coordination of first responders under communication and resource constraints,” in Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems-Volume 3. International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2008, pp. 1409–1412.
H. W. Hamacher and S. A. Tjandra, “Mathematical modelling of evacuation problems–a state of the art,” Pedestrian and evacuation dynamics, vol. 2002, no. 227-266, pp. 1–2, 2002.
Q. Lu, B. George, and S. Shekhar, “Capacity constrained routing algorithms for evacuation planning: A summary of results,” in Advances in spatial and temporal databases. Springer, 2005, pp. 291–307.
T. Hadzic, K. N. Brown, and C. J. Sreenan, “Real-time pedestrian evacuation planning during emergency,” in Tools with Artificial Intelligence (ICTAI), 2011 23rd IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 2011, pp. 597–604.
