Crowd simulation for emergency response using BDI agents based on immersive virtual reality

Abstract

This paper presents a novel methodology involving a Virtual Reality (VR)-based Belief, Desire, and Intention (BDI) software agent to construct crowd simulation and demonstrates the use of the same for crowd evacuation management under terrorist bomb attacks in public areas. The proposed BDI agent framework allows modeling of human behavior with a high degree of fidelity. The realistic attributes that govern the BDI characteristics of the agent are reverse-engineered by conducting human-in-the-loop experiments in the VR-based Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE). To enhance generality and interoperability of the proposed crowd simulation modeling scheme, input data models have been developed to define environment attributes (e.g., maps, demographics, evacuation management parameters). The validity of the proposed data models are tested with two different evacuation scenarios. Finally, experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effect of various crowd evacuation management parameters on the key performance indicators in the evacuation scenario such as crowd evacuation rate and densities. The results reveal that constructed simulation can be used as an effective emergency management tool.