Agent-Based Perception of an Environment in an Emergency Situation

We are interested in the problem of multiagent systems development for risk detecting and emergency response in an uncertain and partially perceived environment. The evaluation of the current situation passes by three stages inside the multiagent system. In a first time, the situation is represented in a dynamic way. The second step, consists to characterise the situation and finally, it is compared with other similar known situations. In this paper, we present an information modelling of an observed environment, that we have applied on the RoboCupRescue Simulation System. Information coming from the environment are formatted according to a taxonomy and using semantic features. The latter are defined thanks to a fine ontology of the domain and are managed by factual agents that aim to represent dynamically the current situation

Information Modeling for a Dynamic Representation of an Emergency Situation

In this paper we propose an approach to build a decision support system that can help emergency planners and responders to detect and manage emergency situations. The internal mechanism of the system is independent from the treated application. Therefore, we think the system may be used or adapted easily to different case studies. We focus here on a first step in the decision-support process which concerns the modeling of information issued from the perceived environment and their representation dynamically using a multiagent system. This modeling was applied on the RoboCupRescue Simulation System. An implementation and some results are presented here.Comment:

Multi-agent simulations for emergency situations in an airport scenario

This paper presents a multi-agent framework using Net- Logo to simulate humanand collective behaviors during emergency evacuations. Emergency situationappears when an unexpected event occurs. In indoor emergency situation, evacuation plans defined by facility manager explain procedure and safety ways tofollow in an emergency situation. A critical and public scenario is an airportwhere there is an everyday transit of thousands of people. In this scenario theimportance is related with incidents statistics regarding overcrowding andcrushing in public buildings. Simulation has the objective of evaluating buildinglayouts considering several possible configurations. Agents could be based onreactive behavior like avoid danger or follow other agent, or in deliberative behaviorbased on BDI model. This tool provides decision support in a real emergencyscenario like an airport, analyzing alternative solutions to the evacuationprocess.Publicad

An information assistant system for the prevention of tunnel vision in crisis management

In the crisis management environment, tunnel vision is a set of bias in decision makers’ cognitive process which often leads to incorrect understanding of the real crisis situation, biased perception of information, and improper decisions. The tunnel vision phenomenon is a consequence of both the challenges in the task and the natural limitation in a human being’s cognitive process. An information assistant system is proposed with the purpose of preventing tunnel vision. The system serves as a platform for monitoring the on-going crisis event. All information goes through the system before arrives at the user. The system enhances the data quality, reduces the data quantity and presents the crisis information in a manner that prevents or repairs the user’s cognitive overload. While working with such a system, the users (crisis managers) are expected to be more likely to stay aware of the actual situation, stay open minded to possibilities, and make proper decisions

Distributed agent-based building evacuation simulator

The optimisation of the evacuation of a building plays a fundamental role in emergency situations. The behaviour of individuals, the directions that civilians receive, and the actions of the emergency personnel, will affect the success of the operation. We describe a simulation system that represents the individual, intelligent, and interacting agents that cooperate and compete while evacuating the building. The system also takes into account detailed information about the building and the sensory capabilities that it may contain. Since the level of detail represented in such a simulation can lead to computational needs that grow at least as a polynomial function of the number of the simulated agents, we propose an agent-oriented Distributed Building Evacuation Simulator (DBES). The DBES is integrated with a wireless sensor network which offers a closed loop representation of the evacuation procedure, including the sensed data and the emergency decision making