MOBEDIC - A Decision Modelling Tool For Emergency Situations

This paper describes a software tool that we have developed at AIAI for modelling the decisions that people make in emergency situations in o shore environments. The tool was developed using C++ and runs on a PC under MS Windows. It has a generic architecture and can be easily extended to other environments with di erent characteristics, e.g., hospitals, commercial buildings, etc. We use frames to represent a person's characteristics and their perception of the environment; scripts are used to de ne typical behaviours for particular situations. Our tool can be used to predict the likely behaviours of a population in hazardous situations and help evaluate the e ectiveness of emergency procedures and training. We have worked with our collaborators to integrate our decision model with their model of people's movement to produce a system that can realistically simulate emergency scenarios on o shore structures. We believe that this is the rst egress and evacuation modelling tool to incorporate both decision making and movement modelling. Our work is therefore an important step in the introduction of improved approaches to the evaluation of o shore safety management. Validating the decision model proved di cult because of lack of suitable data. We acquired additional data by interviewing o shore personnel and monitoring a mustering exercise. We then simulated an o shore emergency scenario and the results were encouraging. In the future we would like to enhance our model by incorporating communication between personnel. This would allow us to model complex scenarios, especially those that cannot be simulated realistically in training exercises.