Introduction

Computer based models describing pedestrian behavior in an emergency evacuation play a vital role in the development of active strategies that minimize the evacuation time when a closed area, with a relatively small number of fixed exits, must be evacuated for a large number of people.

This Research Line proposes a hybrid structure where the dynamics of fire and smoke propagation are modeled by means of Cellular Automata and for simulating people behavior we are using Intelligent Agents. Each agent will possess certain characteristics psychological, physiological and social and based on information that is capable of receiving from its sensors, it may perceive that is happening around, and then take a decision that will reflect its ability to cope with the emergency evacuation, called in this project, behavior.

The simulation model consists of two sub-models, called pedestrian and environmental. As part of the pedestrian model, we have prototyped a methodology that is able to model some of the frequently observed human behaviors in evacuation exercises. The model is a process that consumes a significant amount of time to simulate a complete evacuation, maximum when the environment size and/or the number of people is considerable.

The emergence of multicore processors introduces a real challenge for parallel applications are to exploit such architecture at their potential. The proposal of this research aims to carrying out a parallel shared memory model, performing task-level parallelism (environmental & pedestrian sub models) and where multiples threads assigned of the same task assist in the resolution of disjoint areas of the grid in a data parallelism way. This leads us to develop a model to achieve a competitive performance.

Researchers

Last Contributions

Software

If you are interested in our EVAC Simulator Package (this software is based on Java under GNU Affero GPLv3) do not hesitate to contact with us.

References

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