Evaluation of a Mobile Emergency Management System – A Simulation Approach

Large public events such as sporting events, concerts, fairs and street festivals are quite common in metropolitan areas. Because of the high frequency of such events and the increasing number of involved parties, those being responsible for the organization and execution have to cope with increasing complexity and shortening time frames for planning and preperation. Because of the high concentration of passengers, unplanned incidents that occur during these public events can have devastating effects and can lead to crises and disasters. Emergency management systems that utilize mobile communication infrastructures can provide prompt information delivery to save human lives. In this paper we propose a system design for mobile emergency management and outline our approach of evaluating this system design using multi-agent based simulation. To make our simulation of passenger movements as realistic as possible we gathered empirical data for a large event as well as for normal rush hour traffic.