Distributed Building Evacuation Simulator for Smart Emergency Management

We describe a distributed simulation tool which addresses the unique needs for the simulation of emergency response scenarios. The simulation tool adopts the multi-agent paradigm, so as to facilitate the modelling of diverse and autonomous agents, and it provides mechanisms for the interaction of the entities that are being simulated. It operates in a distributed fashion to reduce the simulation time required for such large-scale systems. The simulation tool represents the individuals that need to be evacuated, the resources that contribute to the evacuation including human rescuers, and other active resources and entities which may include robots and which can autonomously interact with the environment and with each other and take individual or collaborative decisions. We illustrate the tool with an application and compare the results for both centralized and distributed execution. Our results also show the significant reduction in execution time that is achieved for different degrees of distribution of the simulator on multiple servers.