Agent-based modelling the evacuation of endangered areas

Abstract

The evacuation process from endangered areas (EA) in crisis situations is modelled by means of simple agents (gate-ways equipped by sensors). Timed Petri nets (TPN) and first-order hybrid Petri nets (FOHPN) are utilized here to model the EA structure as well as the agents and their cooperation. Rooms, other spaces to be evacuated (corridors) and safe spaces out of EA (where people are evacuated) are modelled by TPN places and FOHPN continuous places. Gate-ways are modelled by TPN subnets and by FOHPN continuous transitions. While the supervisor for the TPN gate-ways can be synthesized by means of place/transition Petri nets (P/T PN), the blocks of FOHPN discrete places and transitions are used to affect the gate-ways. Depending on the immediate throughput of the gate-ways the escape time behaviour is found in the process of simulation. This paper is a free continuation of [4] where the problem was solved solely by means of P/T PN. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.