Publication

K. Janovska and P. Surynek. Hierarchical Control of Swarms during Evacuation. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (KEOD), pages 61-73, 2021.

Abstract: The problem of evacuation is addressed from the perspective of agent-based modeling (ABM) in this paper. We study evacuation as a problem of navigation of multiple agents in a known environment. The environment is divided into a danger and a safe zone while the task of agents is to move from the danger zone to the safe one. Unlike previous approaches that model the environment as a discrete graph with agents placed in its vertices our approach adopts various continuous aspects such as grid-based embedding of the environment into 2D space continuous line of sight of an agent. In addition to this, we adopt hierarchical structure of multi-agent system in which so called leading agents are more informed and are capable of performing multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) via centralized algorithms like conflict-based search (CBS) while so called follower agents are modeled using simple local rules. Our experimental evaluation indicates that suggested modeling approach can serve as a tool for studying the progress and the efficiency of the evacuation process.

Download the paper in pdf.