Strategies for Route Planning on Catastrophe Environments - Coordinating Agents on a Fire Fighting Scenario

The concept of multi-agent systems (MAS) appeared when computer science researchers had the need to solve problems involving the simulation of real environments with several intervenients (agents). Solving these requires a coordination process between agents and in some cases negotiation. Such is the case of a catastrophe scenario with the need intervention to minimize the consequences, like for instance a fire. In this particular case the agents (firemen) must have a good coordination process to achieve as fast as they can their fire fighting position. The main goal of this project is to create an optimal strategy to calculate the best path to the fire fighting position. Tests were conducted on an existing simulator platform Pyrosim. Three factors have an important role: wind (intensity and direction), ground topology and vegetation variety. At the end the results were quite satisfactory, mainly in what concerns the agents main objective. The A* algorithm proved to be feasible for this particular problem, and the coordination process between agents was implemented successfully. In the future this project may have its agents ported to the BDI concept.