Effect of Guidance on Evacuation Behavior Simulations Using Agent Communication

The analysis of building evacuation has recently received increasing attention, as people are keen to assess the safety of occupants. Reports on past huge disasters indicate that human behaviors characterize evacuation during emergencies. Understanding and modeling of human behavior enable improved design of society to better reflect the needs of occupants, for example, to reduce evacuation time, a composite of pre-movement time and travel time. In this paper, we demonstrate that information at the time of emergencies affects human behaviors and the behaviors affect pre-movement time and the time it takes to move people to safe places. Information is transferred to people via announcements and is shared by interpersonal communication. We modeled and implemented that information transfer in an agent-based evacuation system using BDI models that represent the diversity of human psychological states and ACL-based communications that dynamically change people’s beliefs. The model enables an evacuation simulation to consider the effect of information on human behaviors and calculate evacuation time, including the pre-movement time. The simulation results demonstrate that methods of guidance improve evacuation time, and they reveal phenomena in agent behaviors that have not been simulated by other methods.