Crowd Evacuations SaaS: An ABM Approach

Crowd evacuations involve thousands of persons in closed spaces. Having knowledge about where the problematic exits will be or where the disaster may occur can be crucial in emergency planning. We implemented a simulator using Agent Based Modelling able to model the behaviour of people in evacuation situations and a workflow able to run it in the cloud. The input is just a PNG image and the output are statistical results of the simulation executed on the cloud. This allows to provide the user with a system abstraction and only a map of the scenario is needed. Many events are held in main city squares, so to test our system we chose Siena and we fit about 28,000 individuals in the centre of the square. The software has special computational requirements because the results need to be statistically reliable. Because these needs we use distributed computing. In this paper we show how the simulator scales efficiently on the cloud.