A framework to study the resilience of organizations: a case study of a nuclear emergency plan

El desarrollo de la resiliencia es un campo de investigación importante en ámbitos como el Management, la Ingeniería, la Psicología o la Ecología. La importancia del estudio de la resiliencia se ha visto desarrollada por el aumento tanto de desastres naturales como antropogénicos, así como por el desarrollo de conciencia acerca de sus efectos. Estas razones de peso han influido en que los Gobiernos estén invirtiendo recursos en la mejora de la resiliencia de organizaciones, infraestructuras, ciudades, individuos, etc. Sin embargo, a pesar de su importancia, el número de trabajos de investigación que se centran en el desarrollo de metodologías específicas para el diseño de organizaciones resilientes es reducido. El principal objetivo de esta investigación es mejorar este aspecto introduciendo un marco para el diseño de organizaciones resilientes. Para alcanzar este objetivo, se explica cómo emplear el Modelo de Sistemas Viables para el diseño de estas organizaciones. Nos hemos centrado en uno de los aspectos clave de la resiliencia: las comunicaciones. Para ello, se ha usado el caso de estudio del plan de emergencia de una central nuclear en España. Las comunicaciones en una organización pueden modelarse como un proceso de difusión en redes multiplex. Buscamos arquitecturas aplicables a nuestro caso de estudio. Sin embargo, no se ha encontrado ninguna que cumpliera con los requisitos que se necesitaban. Este hecho, nos ha llevado a proponer una nueva arquitectura, que además de permitir estudiar la difusión de información en una organización, permite estudiar otros procesos de difusión en redes multiplex.Departamento de Organización de Empresas y Comercialización e Investigación de MercadosDoctorado en Ingeniería Industria

Integrating BDI agents with Agent-based simulation platforms

Agent-Based Models (ABMs) is increasingly being used for exploring and supporting decision making about social science scenarios involving modelling of human agents. However existing agent-based simulation platforms (e.g., SWARM, Repast) provide limited support for the simulation of more complex cognitive agents required by such scenarios. We present a framework that allows Belief-Desire Intention (BDI) cognitive agents to be embedded in an ABM system. Architecturally, this means that the "brains" of an agent can be modelled in the BDI system in the usual way, while the "body" exists in the ABM system. The architecture is exible in that the ABM can still have non-BDI agents in the simulation, and the BDI-side can have agents that do not have a physical counterpart (such as an organisation). The framework addresses a key integration challenge of coupling event-based BDI systems, with time-stepped ABM systems. Our framework is modular and supports integration off-the-shelf BDI systems with off-the-shelf ABM systems. The framework is Open Source, and all integrations and applications are available for use by the modelling community

Simulation of labor evacuation: The case of housing construction projects

AbstractConstruction sites occupy of the labors who are engaged in many different activities that can expose them to dangerous conditions. During emergencies and extreme events of natural or manmade origin in construction sites, saving labors lives is the primary objective. Therefore, the contractors are required to establish effective emergency plans which have to be improved to aid for rapid egress from construction sites. To support emergency evacuation planning, it is critical to estimate labor evacuation times during project execution. This paper presents a framework that utilizes building information modeling (BIM) and computer simulation to plan the evacuation of labors in construction sites during project execution and to visualize evacuation times of labors at emergency conditions at any time from project duration. The proposed framework utilizes MassMotion software as the simulation platform that enables predicting the labor evacuation times under various conditions. In addition, the evacuation time calculated from computer simulation is used to develop and evaluate the plan. A case study is worked out to demonstrate a simulation of emergency evacuation from a housing building during its construction to demonstrate the use of the proposed framework. Finally, the paper presents the simulation results of labors evacuation in the housing building construction sites

A Framework for Group Modeling in Agent-Based Pedestrian Crowd Simulations

Pedestrian crowd simulation explores crowd behaviors in virtual environments. It is extensively studied in many areas, such as safety and civil engineering, transportation, social science, entertainment industry and so on. As a common phenomenon in pedestrian crowds, grouping can play important roles in crowd behaviors. To achieve more realistic simulations, it is important to support group modeling in crowd behaviors. Nevertheless, group modeling is still an open and challenging problem. The influence of groups on the dynamics of crowd movement has not been incorporated into most existing crowd models because of the complexity nature of social groups. This research develops a framework for group modeling in agent-based pedestrian crowd simulations. The framework includes multiple layers that support a systematic approach for modeling social groups in pedestrian crowd simulations. These layers include a simulation engine layer that provides efficient simulation engines to simulate the crowd model; a behavior-based agent modeling layers that supports developing agent models using the developed BehaviorSim simulation software; a group modeling layer that provides a well-defined way to model inter-group relationships and intra-group connections among pedestrian agents in a crowd; and finally a context modeling layer that allows users to incorporate various social and psychological models into the study of social groups in pedestrian crowd. Each layer utilizes the layer below it to fulfill its functionality, and together these layers provide an integrated framework for supporting group modeling in pedestrian crowd simulations. To our knowledge this work is the first one to focus on a systematic group modeling approach for pedestrian crowd simulations. This systematic modeling approach allows users to create social group simulation models in a well-defined way for studying the effect of social and psychological factors on crowd’s grouping behavior. To demonstrate the capability of the group modeling framework, we developed an application of dynamic grouping for pedestrian crowd simulations

HLA-Transparent Distributed Simulation of Agent-based Systems

Applied mathematic

Improving Fire Emergency Management Using Occupant Information and BIM-Based Simulation

The increasing complexity of buildings has brought some difficulties for emergency response. When fires occur in a building, limited perception regarding the disaster area and occupants can increase the probability of injuries and damages. Thus, the availability of comprehensive and timely information may help understand the existing conditions and plan an efficient evacuation. For this purpose, Building Information Modeling (BIM) should be integrated with three sets of information: (1) occupancy that defines the type of space usage; (2) occupants’ information; and (3) sensory data. The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), as a standard of BIM, has the definitions for all areas, volumes, and elements of a building. IFC also has the basic definitions of sensor and occupant entities. However, these entities do not provide enough dynamic and accurate information for supporting emergency management systems. In addition, building renovation projects have an effect on evacuation time. During the building renovation projects, space is shared between the construction crews and occupants. The construction works change the building layout and movement flow, which increase the occupants’ vulnerability, affecting their evacuation behavior under emergency conditions. Hence, the safety and wellbeing of the occupants as well as their evacuation time should be considered under emergency incidents. This thesis aims to improve fire emergency management using occupant information and BIM-based simulation. For this purpose, a “dynamic BIM” for fire emergency real-time management is developed that captures enough dynamism regarding the building condition as well as environmental conditions and occupants’ behavior. Also, an Agent-Based Model (ABM) is used to assist in the analysis of the static and dynamic behavior of the environment and occupants in BIM. The specific objectives of the research are: (1) extending IfcSensor entity for occupant’s sensors; (2) adding new attributes to IfcOccupant to support emergency response operations and defining a new entity for occupancy; (3) defining the relationships between sensors, occupants, occupancy, time series, and building components in the context of building evacuation; (4) creating dynamic BIM for tracking occupants and environmental states; and (5) evaluating the evacuation time for specific scenarios where additional spatio-temporal constraints exist during a fire incidence. Renovation construction operations are considered as such constraint and an ABM co-simulation framework is developed under emergency conditions. The feasibility of the proposed methods is discussed using different case studies

More-Space – A Simulation Tool for University Room Management

As proposed in various studies, educational facilities hold a high potential yield for improvement of room utilization. The goal of the project “MoreSpace” at Vienna University of Technology (TU Vienna) was to develop a hybrid modeling approach which helps to increase the efficiency of the university’s space utilization. Besides coupling of Discrete Event Simulation (DEVS), Agent-based (AB) methods and Cellular Automata (CA), successful deployment of such a model requires a thorough integration within the peripheral system. Which in turn leads to preconditions that have to be met, (e.g. by input - data, visualization of results, dissemination, etc.). This paper covers the methods applied for analyses of the model and the peripheral system, which enable model integration. For this is necessary to also focus on the psycho-social layer of the institution, as it is this layer that often leads to rejection of otherwise “good” solutions by the people within institutions. The paper further describes a deployment matrix which puts the simulations - models mode of operation (i.e. one time utilization for consulting, recurrent and frequent utilization) into context with met preconditions and the required depth of system integration. This allows it to estimate whether a model can be deployed as intended or not; with alternatives being either a transformation of the system, reformulation of the question(s) towards the model or - in the worst case - abortion of the deployment process. In the latter case the value of the deployment matrix lies within an early judgment of the situation saving resources that would have been spend otherwise. In addition it is possible to use these for developing alternative solutions in support of the intentional goals

A Review of Platforms for the Development of Agent Systems

Agent-based computing is an active field of research with the goal of building autonomous software of hardware entities. This task is often facilitated by the use of dedicated, specialized frameworks. For almost thirty years, many such agent platforms have been developed. Meanwhile, some of them have been abandoned, others continue their development and new platforms are released. This paper presents a up-to-date review of the existing agent platforms and also a historical perspective of this domain. It aims to serve as a reference point for people interested in developing agent systems. This work details the main characteristics of the included agent platforms, together with links to specific projects where they have been used. It distinguishes between the active platforms and those no longer under development or with unclear status. It also classifies the agent platforms as general purpose ones, free or commercial, and specialized ones, which can be used for particular types of applications.Comment: 40 pages, 2 figures, 9 tables, 83 reference

On improving the performance of optimistic distributed simulations

This report investigates means of improving the performance of optimistic distributed simulations without affecting the simulation accuracy. We argue that existing clustering algorithms are not adequate for application in distributed simulations, and outline some characteristics of an ideal algorithm that could be applied in this field. This report is structured as follows. We start by introducing the area of distributed simulation. Following a comparison of the dominant protocols used in distributed simulation, we elaborate on the current approaches of improving the simulation performance, using computation efficient techniques, exploiting the hardware configuration of processors, optimizations that can be derived from the simulation scenario, etc. We introduce the core characteristics of clustering approaches and argue that these cannot be applied in real-life distributed simulation problems. We present a typical distributed simulation setting and elaborate on the reasons that existing clustering approaches are not expected to improve the performance of a distributed simulation. We introduce a prototype distributed simulation platform that has been developed in the scope of this research, focusing on the area of emergency response and specifically building evacuation. We continue by outlining our current work on this issue, and finally, we end this report by outlining next actions which could be made in this field

A Highway-Driving System Design Viewpoint using an Agent-based Modeling of an Affordance-based Finite State Automata

This paper presents an agent-based modeling framework for affordance-based driving behaviors during the exit maneuver of driver agents in human-integrated transportation problems. We start our discussion from one novel modeling framework based on the concept of affordance called the Affordance-based Finite State Automata (AFSA) model, which incorporates the human perception of resource availability and action capability. Then, the agent-based simulation illustrates the validity of the AFSA framework for the Highway-Lane-Driver System. Next, the comparative study between real driving data and agent-based simulation outputs is provided using the transition diagram. Finally, we perform a statistical analysis and a correlation study to analyze affordance-based driving behavior of driver agents. The simulation results show that the AFSA model well represents the perception-based human actions and drivers??? characteristics, which are essential for the design viewpoint of control framework of human driver modeling. This study is also expected to benefit a designed control for autonomous/self-driving car in the future