Modelling an Emergency Evacuation
Mathematical modelling of emergency evacuation in the presence of search and rescue robots: A combined game theoretic and BDI-based approach
Laura Wilmes (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)
A. Jamshidnejad – Mentor (TU Delft - Control & Simulation)
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Abstract
The impact of disasters on the affected population is catastrophic. Proper disaster management practices are needed to reduce their societal damage. This includes Search and Rescue (SaR) missions, which pertain measures to find potentially trapped victims. This task can be alleviated by the support of a fleet of SaR robots. This fleet is deployed to locate trapped victims and to report back their position to the emergency responders and potentially to follow them to track of their potential movements. Locating trapped victims is challenging, as the number of these people, their initial position and potential displacements may be unknown. A behavioral model of the victims can give insight on how they take decisions and act during an evacuation situation. Several techniques are used in the state of the art. This study proposes an evacuation model that integrates game theory into the belief-desire-intention framework. The model is validated with a benchmark from the state of the art. It is found that the model is able to produce realistic evacuation times. This depends on the distribution of the game theoretic strategies in the population. SaR robots are then added to the validated model. It is found that their presence reduces the evacuation time, depending on several parameters influencing trust of the victims in the robots. Thus, this research contributes to the field of research SaR operations by providing insight into the behaviour of the trapped victims in the presence of rescue robots.