SIMULA: an ALGOL-based simulation language
Communications of the ACM
Agent learning in supplier selection models
Decision Support Systems - Special issue: Decision theory and game theory in agent design
Self-Organized Pedestrian Crowd Dynamics: Experiments, Simulations, and Design Solutions
Transportation Science
An agent-based decision support system for wholesale electricity market
Decision Support Systems
An application of agent-based simulation to knowledge sharing
Decision Support Systems
Design and natural science research on information technology
Decision Support Systems
Evacuation planning: a capacity constrained routing approach
ISI'03 Proceedings of the 1st NSF/NIJ conference on Intelligence and security informatics
Design science in information systems research
MIS Quarterly
Computers and Operations Research
| Hi-index | 12.05 |
In this paper, we present a public decision support system (DSS) distinguished from various DSSs in the private business sector in terms of its ownership, data scarcity, and beneficiaries. In particular, our system is intended to play a vital role in assessing and optimizing emergency response plans for rare but catastrophic events such as the September 11th attacks. While taking an agent-based microscopic simulation approach in a hierarchical framework, we used our model to estimate the effectiveness of alternative evacuation strategies to support emergency response planning as a part of business continuity planning for all private business organizations. The presented model is unique because it considers individuals with disabilities explicitly in terms of speed, ability to negotiate the environment, and normalcy bias depending on type of disability. It is also capable of classifying the environment in terms of accessibility characteristics encompassing various conditions which have been shown to have a disproportionate effect upon the behavior of individuals with disabilities during an emergency. Through a series of simulation experiments, our system identified specific locations (e.g., the NW landing) on the 3rd floor of the test bed building as possible bottleneck spots under certain conditions (e.g., the sharp increase in individuals with disabilities among residents). This way, our system provides the architect with tools to test the structure's design to determine how well it meets the identified requirements for emergency evacuation to accommodate this shifting demographic. In particular, our system strongly demonstrated the effectiveness of new emergency evacuation strategies for individuals with disabilities such as assisted evacuations which allows other healthy people to play more active roles compared to traditional strategies in which individuals with disabilities are helplessly waiting for assistants such as fire fighters at the designated area. Our system also revealed that people using wheelchairs and those with lower stamina were at the greatest risk. People with lower stamina such as the elderly, people with chronic health conditions, or those with temporary injuries are at a greater risk mainly because they are not easily identifiable. Ultimately, the proposed DSS system can be used to inform public policy professionals of more effective, evidence-based evacuation planning and environmental design methods based on a better understanding of the behavior of individuals with disabilities.