Modelling Decisions In Emergency Situations

This paper describes a methodology and supporting software tool that has been developed at AIAI for helping to model the decisions that people take in emergency situations o shore. We believe that this is the rst time that people's decision-making has been incorporated into egress and evacuation models. Our work is therefore an important rst step in the introduction of improved approaches to the evaluation of platform layout, facilities and emergency procedures. We have worked with our collaborators to integrate our model of people's decisions with their model of people's movement. The result is that people's movement is modi ed by factors such as their reactions to alarms, their reactions to hazards, their familiarity with the installation, their training and their role. Our program has a generic architecture for modelling decisions. We have used \scripts" to de ne typical actions or procedures associated with particular conditions: people in the computer simulation adopt particular scripts according to the situations in which they nd themselves. In future developments, we would like to improve the decision model by incorporating communication between individuals as a scenario proceeds. This would be particularly useful in: scenarios which go beyond muster to evacuation; scenarios where there is signi cant structural damage; scenarios where there are casualties; and scenarios that cannot be simulated realistically in exercises. The software runs on a 486 PC under Windows 3.1. Safety analysts can build oor plans and set up scenarios with di erent facilities, populations or hazards, to determine their various e ects.