Evacuation Simulation Method by Approximating Flow Function on Multi-Agent Model

Abstract

Currently, multi-agent model is the main method of disaster evacuation simulation. Therefore, enormous computational resources are required to execute a large scale simulation. We propose a new approximate simulation method to more efficiently calculate simulations based on multi-agent model. In our method, we perform multi-agent simulation in many small areas and calculate the evacuee flow rate. By functional approximating of the evacuee flow rate, approximate models called “partial area model” are obtained. In a large-scale evacuation simulation, the partial area models corresponding to the parameters of each region are tiled on the map. The evacuation progress can be obtained quickly by calculating the evacuee flow rate between the arranged areas. In this paper, we defined an evacuation agent model, and executed a large area evacuation simulation both by the simple multi-agent model and by the proposed method. We assumed 30000 evacuees from the 2 km square area of the Amagasaki city coastal area in the both simulation. Our method is able to calculate with less than 1% run time compared with simple multi-agent model. Despite the drastic reduction in calculation time, the proposed method was able to realize a global transition of evacuation obtained by the simple multi-agent model. For the planing and verification of evacuation plans for wide evacuation areas, we have to weigh a huge number of parameters for evacuees and target area. It will be possible to elaborate a more efficient evacuation plan by improving the efficiency of the evacuation simulation by our method.