2018 Volume 10 Issue 1 Pages 17-24
Multi-agent systems are often used in evacuation simulation. The agent needs to be modeled to include psychological factors of evacuees. The following behavior, which is one of the major psychological factors, is defined as the behavior to follow other persons when he/she does not know where to evacuate. While the following behavior is known as the risk of inducing wrongly directed evacuation, it may expedite the evacuation by chaining a group of people to a right direction. The effects of following behavior are, however, almost unknown at the city level.
In this paper, the agent model with the following behavior is introduced and evaluated its property at the city level. Also, two models of “path memory” and “follow-up promotion behavior” are proposed as countermeasures against the property of evacuation delaying caused by the following behavior.
Through the evacuation simulation experiments assuming the tsunami disaster, it is shown that evacuation speed depends on the ratio of the agents who know an evacuation spot. Also, we show that “path memory” accelerates the evacuation behavior when few surrounding agents have knowledge on the evacuation spots as well as “follow-up promotion behavior” shows the same tendency when several surrounding agents have the same knowledge.
