Panel: Agent-based modeling of mass egress and evacuations

We will discuss several recent advances in agent-based modeling, with applications to mass egress and wide area evacuations following disasters. These advances include: efficiency improvements in specifying people’s identification and selection of exit routes, making it possible to handle up to 70,000 people-agents; incorporation of new crowd movement depiction (“Continuum Crowds”) for greatly increased realism; efficient real-time visualization depiction of the resulting behaviors; and including the effects of communication and direction, on scales ranging from individual facilities to metropolitan areas.