Multi-Agent Simulation of Wayfinding for Rescue Operation during Building Fire

Authors: G. Sokhansefat, M. Delavar, M. Banedj-Schafii

Abstract:

Recently research on human wayfinding has focused mainly on mental representations rather than processes of wayfinding. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the rationality behind applying multi-agent simulation paradigm to the modeling of rescuer team wayfinding in order to develop computational theory of perceptual wayfinding in crisis situations using image schemata and affordances, which explains how people find a specific destination in an unfamiliar building such as a hospital. The hypothesis of this paper is that successful navigation is possible if the agents are able to make the correct decision through well-defined cues in critical cases, so the design of the building signage is evaluated through the multi-agent-based simulation. In addition, a special case of wayfinding in a building, finding one-s way through three hospitals, is used to demonstrate the model. Thereby, total rescue time for rescue operation during building fire is computed. This paper discuses the computed rescue time for various signage localization and provides experimental result for optimization of building signage design. Therefore the most appropriate signage design resulted in the shortest total rescue time in various situations.

Keywords: Multi-Agent system (MAS), Spatial Cognition, Wayfinding, Indoor Environment, Geospatial Information System (GIS).

Digital Object Identifier (DOI): doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1082403

References:

[1] D. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things, Doubleday, New York, 1988.
[2] J. Shi, A. Ren, C. Chen, (2008) "Agent-based evacuation model of large public buildings under fire conditions. Automat," Constr, Vol. 18, pp. 338-347, 2008.
[3] R. Koester "Lost Person Behavior: A search and rescue guide on where to look for land, air, and water. Charlottesville," 2008.
[4] M. Raubal, "Agent-Based Simulation of Human Wayfinding: A Perceptual Model for Unfamiliar Buildings". PhD Thesis, Vienna University of Technology, Austria, 2001a.
[5] T.Garling, E. Lindberg, and T. Mantyla, "Orientation in buildings: effects of familiarity, visual access, and orientation aids," Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 68, pp. 177-186. 1988.
[6] S. Moeser, "Cognitive mapping in a complex building," Environment and Behavior, Vol. 20, pp. 21-49, 1988.
[7] K. Arai, T. X. Sang,; N. T. Uyen, "Task Allocation model for rescue disabled persons in disaster area with help of volunteers," International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications (IJACSA), Vol. 3, No. 7, pp. 45-58, Apr 2012.
[8] M. Goetz, "using crowdsourced indoor geodata for the creation of a three-dimensional indoor routing web application," Future Internet, Vol.4, May 2012, pp. 575-591.
[9] M. H. Zaharia, F. Leon, C. Pal, , and G. Pagu, "Agent-based simulation of crowd evacuation behavior. international conference on automatic control," Modeling and Simulation, pp. 529-533, 2011.
[10] J. W.Cole, C. E. Sabel, E. Blumenthal, K. Finnis, A. Dantas, S. Barnard, , and D. M. Johnston, "GIS-based emergency and evacuation planning for volcanic hazards in New Zealand," Bulletin of the New Zealand society for earthquake engineering, vol. 38, no. 3 ,July 2005.
[11] L. Hajibabai, M. Delavar, M. Malek, A. U. Frank, "Agent-based simulation of spatial cognition and wayfinding in building fire emergency evacuation," In Geomatics Solutions for Disaster Management, Lecture notes geoinformation and cartography, 2007, pp. 255-270.
[12] C. Ren, C.Yang, and S. Jin, (2009). "Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation on emergency," Part II, LNICST 5 , Jan 2009, pp.1451- 1461.
[13] C. T. Quang, A. Drogoul, and A. Boucher, "Interactive Learning of Independent Experts- Criteria for Rescue Simulations", Journal of Universal Computer Science, Vol. 15, No. 13, 2701-2725, 2009.
[14] M. Bakillah, H. Klüpfel, G. Lämmel, A. Zipf, " Agent based simulation for disaster preparedness," in Proc. of 6th International Conference on Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics (PED 2012), Zurich, Switzerland, 6-8 June 2012.
[15] L. Wu, H. Lin, "personalized spatial cognitive road network for agentbased modeling of pedestrian evacuation simulation: A case study in Hong Kong," Ann. GIS, Vol.18, pp. 109-119, 2012.
[16] W.W.F. Klingsch, C. Rogsch, A. Schadschneider, M. Schreckenberg, Pedestrian and Evacuation Dynamics ,Springer: Berlin, Germany, pp. 847, 2010.
[17] R. Sengupta, and R. Sieber. "Geospatial agents, agents everywhere ... transactions in GIS," Vol. 11pp. 483-506, 2007.
[18] S. Russell, and P. Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. 2nd ed. Prentice Hall Series in Artificial Intelligence, London: Prentice Hall, 2003.
[19] M. Wooldridge, An Introduction to multi-agent systems. John Wiley and Sons, Ltd., London, 2002.
[20] J. Ferber," Multi-agent systems. an introduction to distributed artificial intelligence. "Addison-Wesley, 1999.
[21] E. Gat, On Three-Layer Architectures, In: D. Kortenkamp et al. (eds.), Artificial Intelligence and Mobile Robots, AAAI Press, 1998.
[22] G. Sokhansefat, M. Delavar, A. Frank, M. Banedj-Schafii "Indoor environment wayfinding using signage," Proc.10th International Congress on Advances in Civil Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, 17-19 October 2012, pp. 245-255.
[23] D. Mark, "Cognitive models of geographical space," International Journal of Geographical Information Science Vol.13, pp. 747-774, 1999.
[24] J. Gibson, "The ecological approach to the visual perception of pictures," Leonardo, Vol.11, Apr. 1978, pp. 227-235.
[25] F. Zhao, L. Guibas, "Wireless Sensor Networks" Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2004.
[26] K. Janowicz, M. Raubal, "Affordance-based similarity measurement for entity types, in spatial information theory," Proc. 8th International Conference, COSIT, Melbourne, Australia, September 2007, S. Winter, et al., Editors. 2007, Springer: Berlin. pp. 133-151.
[27] M. Raubal, S. Winter, C. Dorr (2009) "Decentralized Time Geography for Ad-Hoc Collaborative Planning, in Spatial Information Theory" Proc. 9th International Conference, COSIT 2009, Aber Wrac-h, France, September 2009, K. Stewart Hornsby, et al., Editors. 2009, Springer: Berlin. pp. 436-452.
[28] M. Kuhn, Ontologies from Texts. in: A. Caschetta (Ed.), GIScience 2000, Savannah, Georgia, USA, pp. 49-51.
[29] Y. Luo, L. Bologna "Children in the Forest: Towards a Canonical Problem of Spatio-Temporal Collaboration," in AAMAS'07, Int. Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. Honolulu, Hawai'i, USA: IFAAMAS, 2007.
[30] M. J. North, T. R. Howe, N. T. Collier, and J. R. Vos, " A Declarative model assembly infrastructure for verification and validation," S. Takahashi, D.L. Sallach and J. Rouchier (eds.), Advancing Social Simulation: The First World Congress, Springer, Heidelberg, 2007.
[31] S. Tisue, U. Wilensky, "NetLogo: Design and Implementation of a Multi-Agent Modeling Environment," Proc. of the Agent Conference, 2004, pp.161-184.
[32] G. Yamamoto, H. Tai, H Mizuta. "A platform for massive agent-based simulation and its evaluation," MMAS, 2008, pp.1-12.
[33] I.V. A. Rao, M. Jain, K. Karlapalem, "Towards simulating billions of agents in thousands of seconds," AAMAS, No. 143, 2007.
[34] Sakellariou, P. Kefalas, I. Stamatopoulou, "Teaching intelligent agents using NetLogo," Pro.of the ACM-IFIP IEEIII Informatics Education Europe III Conference, Venice, Italy, 2008.
[35] M. Raubal, M. Worboys (1999) "A formal model of the process of wayfinding in built environments," Proc. of Spatial Information Theory - Cognitive and Computational Foundations of Geographic Information Science, International Conference COSIT '99, Stade, Germany, 1999.
[36] L. Hajibabai, M. R. Delavar, M. R Malek, and A. U. Frank, "Spatial Cognition and Wayfinding Strategy During Building Fire," Proc. 3rd Internationa Conference on Spatial Cognition, Rome, Italy, Vol 3, jan 2006, pp. 6-17.
[37] C. Jensen, K.-J. Li, S. Winter, "The other 87%: A report on The Second International Workshop on Indoor Spatial Awareness (San Jose, California-November 2, 2010)," ACM Sigspatial Newsletter, Vol.3, Apr. 2011, pp.10-12.
[38] M. Goetz, A. Zipf, "Formal definition of a user-adaptive and lengthoptimal routing graph for complex indoor environments," Geo-Spat. Inf. Sci., Vol. 14, pp.119-128, Apr. 2011.
[39] S. Winter, "Indoor spatial information," Int. J. 3-D Inf. Model. Vol.1, pp.25-42, 2012.
[40] M. Raubal "Human wayfinding in unfamiliar buildings: a simulation with a cognizing agent," Cognitive Processing .Vol 2, pp.363-388, 2001b.
[41] M. Raubal, S. Winter "Time geography for ad-hoc shared-ride trip planning in mobile geosensor networks," ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Vol. pp. 366-381, 2007.
[42] G. Weiss, Multiagent Systems - A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 1999.
[43] R.W. Thomas, R. J. Huggett, Modelling in Geography, Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Nobel, 1980.
[44] C. D. Tomlin "Map algebra: One perspective," Landscape and Urban Planning, Vol 30, pp.3-12, 1994.
[45] A. U Frank, A Theory for Geographic Information Systems, Unpublished Manuscript, 2005.