Agent-based Simulation of Heuristics-driven Evacuation Behavior Under Radiological Emergency: A Case Study of the Ko-ri Area

Abstract

The advancement of information and communications technology (ICT) has solved various real-world problems while predicting and managing changes in human society is still challenging. In this study, an agent-based approach is proposed for human evacuees under radiological emergencies. The cognitive concepts of heuristics and affordances are incorporated in a belief-desire-intention platform for agents to perceive and interact with their surrounding environs and neighbors. Two known heuristics of pedestrian and imitation behaviors are integrated to capture the evacuation behaviors and its system-level dynamics, with a case study of the Ko-ri site in the South Korea. The simulation results verify that the temporal dynamics of the evacuation behaviors is similar to the hump pattern of the empirical disasters. The availability heuristics of human beings is revealed to be underestimated in many evacuation simulations, whereas the property has been observed in wide domains. The proposed approach is expected to help the understanding of human evacuees, which rely on the embedded automatic system, and their management under emergencies.