Salvatore Caprì

Multi agent simulation of pedestrian behavior in closed spatial environments

Agent-based simulations show their potential in many context of transport management in presence of unusual demand, such as airport passenger terminals, railway stations, urban pedestrian areas, public buildings, street events or open space exhibitions, where management or control by related authorities and public safety are strongly affected by spatial geometry and crowd behavior. We illustrate these ideas with an example based on the simulation of people visiting and evacuating a museum, which offers an excellent test environment for simulating a collective behavior emerging from local movements in a closed space. The model we apply is developed within a programmable modeling environment, NetLogo, designed for simulating time-evolution of complex systems. We verify the existing emergency plan for building evacuation, for different demand patterns such as visiting group size and inter-arrival times, and we compare it with alternative evacuation strategies looking for the optimal one. In this respect, we further demonstrate the effectiveness of agent-based simulations in finding emergent results difficult to be predicted.

VTOL aircraft in emergency planning and management: a model for a helipad network.

The scientific literature regarding HEMS (Helicopter Emergency Medical Service) planning lacks a method for defining optimal sites for helipads that takes into account risk distribution and hospital location. Such a method could minimise overall rescue time in emergency situations. In this paper a method that supports the decisions taken by disaster planners and managers is developed, focusing on the quantification of necessary air resources for the management of some probable calamities. Given a region characterised by a natural and non-natural disaster risk map, along with a comprehensive transport system (also characterised by a risk map), a set of emergency destinations (hospitals), a set of heliports/helipads dislocated on the territory and a number of available HEMS rotorcraft, the aim of the paper is to assess the adequacy of the VTOL/FATO (Vertical Take-Off and Landing/Final Take-Off and Landing Area) system in order to deal with a set of possible emergencies.