Multi-Agent Simulation of Wayfinding for Rescue Operation during Building Fire
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.
[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.
[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.
@article{"International Journal of Information, Control and Computer Sciences:63133", author = "G. Sokhansefat and M. Delavar and M. Banedj-Schafii", title = "Multi-Agent Simulation of Wayfinding for Rescue Operation during Building Fire", 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).", volume = "6", number = "12", pages = "1748-9", }
