ESCAPES: evacuation simulation with children, authorities, parents, emotions, and social comparison

In creating an evacuation simulation for training and planning, realistic agents that reproduce known phenomenon are required. Evacuation simulation in the airport domain requires additional features beyond most simulations, including the unique behaviors of firsttime visitors who have incomplete knowledge of the area and families that do not necessarily adhere to often-assumed pedestrian behaviors. Evacuation simulations not customized for the airport domain do not incorporate the factors important to it, leading to inaccuracies when applied to it. In this paper, we describe ESCAPES, a multiagent evacuation simulation tool that incorporates four key features: (i) different agent types; (ii) emotional interactions; (iii) informational interactions; (iv) behavioral interactions. Our simulator reproduces phenomena observed in existing studies on evacuation scenarios and the features we incorporate substantially impact escape time. We use ESCAPES to model the International Terminal at L...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Jason Tsai, Natalie Fridman, Emma Bowring, Matthew Brown, Shira Epstein, Gal A. Kaminka, Stacy Marsella, Andrew Ogden, Inbal Rika, Ankur Sheel, Matthew E. Taylor, Xuezhi Wang, Avishay Zilka, Milind Tambe
• Keywords: ATAL 2011, Emotional Interactions, Evacuation Simulation, Intelligent Agents, Simulation Tool