Towards a Holistic Framework for the Evaluation of Emergency Plans in Indoor Environments

Abstract

One of the most promising fields for ambient intelligence is the implementation of intelligent emergency plans. Because the use of drills and living labs cannot reproduce social behaviors, such as panic attacks, that strongly affect these plans, the use of agent-based social simulation provides an approach to evaluate these plans more thoroughly. (1) The hypothesis presented in this paper is that there has been little interest in describing the key modules that these simulators must include, such as formally represented knowledge and a realistic simulated sensor model, and especially in providing researchers with tools to reuse, extend and interconnect modules from different works. This lack of interest hinders researchers from achieving a holistic framework for evaluating emergency plans and forces them to reconsider and to implement the same components from scratch over and over. In addition to supporting this hypothesis by considering over 150 simulators, this paper: (2) defines the main modules identified and proposes the use of semantic web technologies as a cornerstone for the aforementioned holistic framework; (3) provides a basic methodology to achieve the framework; (4) identifies the main challenges; and (5) presents an open and free software tool to hint at the potential of such a holistic view of emergency plan evaluation in indoor environments.

A Participatory Agent-Based Simulation for Indoor Evacuation Supported by Google Glass

“…It is an optional element, since these operations can be usually done through the management interface of the agent simulation system, although this enables seamless access to management functionalities from mobile or web user interfaces. An implementation of this approach has been done with the agent-based simulator UbikSim 2.0 (License GPLv3, GSI, UPM, Madrid, Spain) [ 49 ].…”

“…An adapted version of the agent-based social simulator UbikSim 2.0 [ 49 ] is used to recreate the human behavior inside a building. For that purpose, the map of the building where the emergency simulation takes place is modeled and represented on this tool.…”

“…Furthermore, UbikSim 2.0 [ 49 ] implements several evacuation plans as summarized below. Random initial wait: This policy consists of making agents wait a random number of simulation steps (zero to 50) before starting the flight to minimize breakdowns in access to exits.…”

An Ambient Intelligence Framework for End-User Service Provisioning in a Hospital Pharmacy: a Case Study

“…There are studies that explored the characteristics of frameworks [ 7 ] enabling the creation of prosumer services [ 8 ]. These tools offer different creation strategies [ 1 ], such as natural languages and, semi-automatic solutions requiring more effort from the users [ 9 ].…”

A Novel Agent-Based Rumor Spreading Model in Twitter

“…ABSS has become one of the most popular technologies to model and study complex adaptive systems such as emergency management [18], intelligent environments [7], and e-commerce [19]. In the rumor case, ABSS allows researchers to understand how a piece of information spreads on a network and evaluate strategies to control its diffusions; maximizing it in the case of advertisement or minimizing in the case of malicious rumors.…”