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

Master Thesis (2023)
Author(s)

Laura Wilmes (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)

Contributor(s)

A. Jamshidnejad – Mentor (TU Delft - Control & Simulation)

Faculty
Aerospace Engineering
Copyright
© 2023 Laura Wilmes
More Info
expand_more
Publication Year
2023
Language
English
Copyright
© 2023 Laura Wilmes
Graduation Date
28-06-2023
Awarding Institution
Delft University of Technology
Programme
['Aerospace Engineering']
Faculty
Aerospace Engineering
Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

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.

Files

MasterThesisLauraWilmes.pdf
(pdf | 2.78 Mb)
License info not available