A formal approach to model emotional agents behaviour in disaster management situations

Abstract

Emotions in Agent and Multi-Agent Systems change their behaviour to a more 'natural' way of performing tasks thus increasing believability. This has various implications on the overall performance of a system. In particular in situations where emotions play an important role, such as disaster management, it is a challenge to infuse artificial emotions into agents, especially when a plethora of emotion theories are yet to be fully accepted. In this work, we develop a formal model for agents demonstrating emotional behaviour in emergency evacuation. We use state-based formal methods to define agent behaviour in two layers; one that deals with non-emotional and one dealing with emotional behaviour. The emotional level takes into account emotions structures, personality traits and emotion contagion models. A complete formal definition of the evacuee agent is given followed by a short discussion on visual simulation and results to demonstrate the refinement of the formal model into code. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.