Masaru Okaya

Evacuation Simulation with Guidance for Anti-disaster Planning

Crowd evacuation simulations are useful tools for analyzing and assessing the safety of building occupants. Agent-based simulations provide a platform for computing individual as well as and collective behaviors in crowds. During an evacuation, it is well known that trained leaders or evacuation guidance play a key role in saving human lives. In this paper, we propose an evacuation simulation system where agents are guided by evacuation orders from authorities. The simulations captured typical behaviors observed during crowd evacuation. For example, the total evacuation time was reduced when most of the agents followed the guidance, although the evacuation times of individual agents were different. When a specific agent is involved in the movement of other agents to a different destination, the evacuation takes a longer amount of time. The simulation appears to depict real-life situations well, which shows that simulations can be a useful tool to estimate evacuation situations prior to emergency evacuation drills.

Evacuation simulation with communication for anti-disaster planning

Crowd evacuation simulations are a tool for analyzing and assessing the safety of occupants in buildings. Agent-based simulations provide a platform for computing individual and collective behaviors in crowds. During evacuation, it is well known that trained leaders or evacuation guides have a key role to play in saving human lives. We propose an evacuation simulation system where agents are guided by evacuation orders from authorities or where agents can acquire information from other agents in the vicinity. We considered two different situations to test the effects of evacuation guidance acquired by agents themselves during evacuations. The simulations captured typical behaviors observed in crowd evacuations. For example, the total evacuation time was reduced when most of agents followed the guidance, although the evacuation times of individual agents were different. A specific agent involved in the movements of agents moving to another place took a longer time to evacuate. The simulation appeared to capture real situations, which shows that simulations can be used to estimate evacuation situations prior to emergency evacuation drills.

Effect of Guidance Information and Human Relations Among Agents on Crowd Evacuation Behavior

Evacuating people during emergency situations or natural disasters is a complex task. In simulation systems, evacuees have been treated equally, or at least physical difference such as the evacuees’ ages and genders are considered as parameters of simulations. We believe the content of guidance information influences their mental states, as well as helps to alleviate anxiety about their own and their family’s safety, and leads to evacuation behaviors based on their situations. The effect of guidance information as it relates to family relationships among agents is simulated with our ABS evacuation simulation system. Three evacuation scenarios involving different types of disasters are simulated and the results are discussed.

A navigation method of service robots at shelters

Great East Japan Earthquake occurred at March 11 2011 and following Tsunami and the Fukushima 1 nuclear disaster have forced many people to evacuate from their habitations to other places. These have thrown down many challenges to service robots. According to a report from Japanese government, about 120,000 people live at evacuated places and 40,000 among them live in temporary shelters, such as schools or community centers at June 2. Moving around shelters is one of challenges that robots do services to people. It is difficult to prepare a complete map of shelters and to operate robots autonomously at shelters where conditions dynamically change, and also it is hard to move robots by remote operation because manpower is needed for other tasks. In this paper, the experiments of robot operation by elderly and of the proposed indication method are introduced. We propose a method of indication to robot and AR marks and QRcode and discuss the merits of the marks that can be both human and robot readable marks.

Agent-Based Evacuation Behavior Simulations and Evacuation Guidance

Building evacuation analysis has recently received increasing attention, as people are keen to assess the safety of occupants. Reports on past disasters indicate that human behavior characterizes evacuation during emergencies. The understanding and modeling of human behavior enable improved design of evacuation plans 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 behavior and that this behavior affects pre-movement time and the time it takes to move people to safe places. Information is shared with people via announcements and through interpersonal communication. We have modeled and simulated information transfer in an agent-based evacuation system, using BDI models that represent the diversity of human psychological states and using ACL-based communications that dynamically change people’s beliefs. The model enables an evacuation simulation to consider the effect of information on human behavior and calculate evacuation time, including 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.

Parallel Computation Using GPGPU to Simulate Crowd Evacuation Behaviors: Planning Effective Evacuation Guidance at Emergencies

We propose parallel computing to simulate crowd evacuation behavior. It allows evacuation of ten thousands of agents to be simulated faster than does the existing system. Our prototype system consists of a new traffic simulator and scenario generator. The traffic simulation system uses a general purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) and simulates the agents’ movements in a three-dimensional map. Our proposal enables realistic evacuation simulations and provides a platform that widens the applications of RoboCup Rescue Simulation to, for example, crowd evacuation from buildings. The evacuation simulations help security offices to prepare manuals for emergencies.

Proposal for everywhere evacuation simulation system

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, evacuation simulation has the potential for decreasing the amount of damage resulting from disasters, and, in particular, for saving human lives. Agent based simulation provides a platform for computing individual and collective behaviors that occur in crowds. Such simulations have led to proposals for enhanced prompt public evacuation. For the public, it is desirable to simulate the behavior of evacuation in any building. We propose an everywhere evacuation simulation system. This system provides a software environment that permits evacuation simulation for any location for which plans are provided on the Web. Three-dimensional (3D) models of buildings and geographic information system (GIS) data for areas that are created for everyday purposes such as sightseeing are used as the environments for simulations. The characteristics of humans are set by users, and their evacuation behaviors are simulated with the relationships among them. The results of simulations can be viewed on the Web by allocating heterogeneous agents inside 2D/3D maps of buildings.

A hybrid agent simulation system of rescue simulation and USARSim simulations from going to fire-escape doors to evacuation to shelters

Disaster & rescue simulations handle complex social issues, the macro level modeling of which is difficult. Agent-based social simulation provides a platform to simulate such social issues. It is ideal that the simulations cover various evacuation patterns and the results are used to make effective plans against disasters. This requires that the behaviors of a numbers of heterogeneous agents are simulated at urban size areas in hostile environments. Representing all buildings of the area by 3D model requires a large amount of computer resources and computing the behaviors of a number of agents takes a lot of computation time. These make it difficult to simulate rescue behaviors at disasters in real scale. We propose a hybrid agent simulation system that switches systems that is suitable for situations during simulations. A hybrid system of two simulations with different time and space resolution makes it possible to simulate urban size human behaviors and indoor movements with less computational resources than doing by one system. This paper presents protocols that connect two systems that are used in RoboCup Rescue Simulation League, Rescue Agent Simulation and USARSim. The prototype system provides a simulation of people’s evacuation from going to fire-escape doors to moving to shelters.