Multiscale Agent-based Simulation in Large City Areas: Emergency Evacuation use Case

Abstract

Complex phenomena are increasingly attracting the interest of researchers from various branches of computational science. So far, this interest has conditioned the demand not only for more sophisticated autonomous models, but also for mechanisms that would bringthem together. This paper presents a multiscale agent-based modeling and simulation technique based on the incorporation of multiple modules. Two key principles are presented as guiding such an integration: common abstract space as a space, where entities of different models interact, and commonly controlled agents – abstract actors operating in a common space, which can be handled by different agent-based models. The proposed approach is evaluated through a series of experiments simulating the emergency evacuation from acinema building to the city streets, where building and street levels are reproduced in heterogeneous models.