On a Mass Evacuation Simulator with Complex Autonomous Agents and Applications

Abstract

This paper presents the details of a mass evacuation simulator with complex autonomous agents on a high resolution model of environment along with demonstrative applications that highlight its usefulness, need and uniqueness. Most of existing mass evacuation simulators are based on simplified models, and the use of complex models is limited to small scale simulations. This simulator makes use of high performance computing to introduce a complex agent system to simulate evacuations in hundreds of square kilometer size domains. The framework of the developed multi-agent system and some of the agents’ constituent functions for interacting with high resolution grid are briefly explained. Interactions are validated using field observations. Two sets of applications are presented to demonstrate the systems use for simulating mixed mode evacuation and evacuation in dynamically changing environment.