How Can the RoboCup Rescue Simulation Contribute to Emergency Preparedness in Real-World Disaster Situations?

The RoboCup Rescue project is based on the situations that occurred during the Great Hanshin Earthquake in 1995. Various types of disasters occurred after the Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake, and the experiences from managing such disasters has shown that evacuation with prompt and appropriate information at the initial period of the disaster is as important as the rescue operations during the disasters. In this paper, we discuss validation and verification of the agent based systems that can simulate the behaviors of individuals and collective evacuation behavior during emergency situations. Collective behavior is difficult to verify by executing evacuation drills in the real world. The effectiveness of evacuation simulations is shown and a plan of experiments at RoboCup venues is proposed to challenge the validation and verification of social simulation and to prove the usefulness of as real-world applications.