Qualitative Methods of Validating Evacuation Behaviors

Abstract

Multi-agent simulations (MAS) have been used to study the dynamics of social systems. Disaster-related simulation is one of application fields. The simulation is applied to scenarios that are difficult to perform drills in the real world. The results provide useful data such as the amount of time people take to evacuate buildings and how smoothly rescue responders arrive at target points in the buildings. Making use of the simulation results to plan disaster-prevention measure, we need to verify that the simulation results that are reasonable at scenarios that are not confirmed from real data and observations. In this paper, we discuss the standardization process of MAS-based evacuation simulations by examining qualitative differences perceived in our evacuation simulations. IntroductionDisasters may occur anytime and anywhere in the world. Disaster prevention methods are planned and drills are conducted to check disaster-related social systems involving damage assessment, response measurement, and evacuation guidance because these help save lives during emergencies. These drills are used to estimate the required safe egress time (RSET) and improve prevention plans for emergency situations. Students at schools and occupants of buildings are encouraged to participate in such drills. However, it is difficult to conduct drills that involve a large number of people in real-world environments, such as the scenario that occurred on September 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center (WTC) buildings in New York City [1].We learn how people behaved during disasters from media stories and reports published by those in authority. Their actions involve the following general phenomena: they begin evacuation based on their individual circumstances; they communicate with each other and share information about the emergency; people in T. Takahashi the vicinity of the area where the emergency occurred adjust their actions according to the shared information. These phenomena reflect features of collective behavior in emergency situations. The simulation of these phenomena includes modeling individual emotions, interactions between humans, and characterizing the behavior of groups of people in a crowd. The simulation system that consists of these components provides a solution to a possible emergency. However, nobody can validate the results of the simulations or guarantee how the system would really work during an emergency.We believe that evacuation simulation systems can be used not only to estimate the time taken for evacuation but also to check how smoothly rescue responders reach their targets at emergency sites. In this paper, we discuss qualitative standards of validating simulations result that are hard to be checked with experiments in the real world. Section 21.2 describes related works and background scenarios. Section 21.3 shows our evacuation simulations as an example of disaster-related social systems. Conditions of validating simulations qualitatively are discussed in Sect. 21.4. Section 21.5 provides a descrip...