Cybernetics Approach Using Agent-Based Modeling in the Process of Evacuating Educational Institutions in Case of Disasters

• Main Authors: Ștefan Ionescu, Ionuț Nica, Nora Chiriță
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-09-01
• Series: Sustainability
• Subjects: cybernetics approach; agent-based modeling; NetLogo; evacuation process; human behavior simulation
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/18/10277

In the context of an emergency, evacuating people from a location in the shortest possible time is essential, as is the high degree of safety that people should expect when evacuating. Lately, in Romania there have been more and more fire events generated by different causes. This article will use agent-based modeling to simulate an emergency evacuation model in NetLogo. The model has been used to perform and analyze various scenarios. With the help of NetLogo, we managed to perform 400 simulations with the evacuation of 180 people (students, teachers, and non-teaching staff) based on which we developed several recommendations to streamline the evacuation process in order to reduce the possibility of death. The present research will help to identify the evacuation times from a school, but it will also highlight certain aspects that may occur during the evacuation. The model that was used in this research took into account the individual particularities of the people taking part in the evacuation, emphasizing the effects that form in a crowd of people when evacuating; effects such as the funnel effect, which is caused by the formation of bottlenecks around narrow areas. All these things are part of the analysis of the measurement of entropy of the exhaust system, a problem that has captured all of the specialists’ attention. Finally, solutions have been proposed to improve evacuation time in case of disasters.