Multi-agent Approach for Return Route Support System Simulation

Abstract

We propose a system that supports stranded commuters caused by a large-scale disaster. When a large-scale disaster breaks out, buildings may collapse and roads may be damaged and the public transportation systems would be paralyzed. Thus, people working in the city center have to walk back home on foot. The problem is that when those people start walking, the situation along the routes for returning home may be different from that of the pre-disaster. Not only may it be the first time for most of them to walk home, but also the return route may be extremely complex due to many detours. They have to look for alternative routes whenever bridges collapse and fires break out. Making situation become worse, modern people intensively use navigation systems, those systems may be unavailable due to the paralyzed Internet. A large scale disaster may destroy base stations of wireless phones, and even if it does not completely destroy them, extreme congestion may paralyze the communication infrastructure so that not only net-surfing using smartphone, but also collecting information by e-mail may become impossible. To deal with such situations, we are designing a system that provides those unfortunate pedestrians appropriate return routes to their homes without depending on the communication infrastructures. Instead, our proposed system only depends on smartphones of those pedestrians and constructs mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) to collect and disperse useful information. We employ multiple mobile agents extensively for information collection and dispersion. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of our system, we have constructed a preliminary prototype of the simulation system and have conducted numerical experiments.

Multi-Agent Base Evacuation Support System Using MANET

“…In the previous studies, we proposed the basic con¯guration of such an evacuation support system and veri¯ed its feasibility with simulation. 1,2 In this study, we have expanded the features of the system and verify its usefulness with a simulator named NS-3. In the previous papers, we only employed mobile agents to disseminate information about the circumstances.…”