Abstract
We introduce a novel two-dimensional simulator for disaster response on maps of real cities. Our simulator deals with logistics and coordination problems and allows to plug-in almost any approach developed for simulated environments. In addition, it (1) offers functionalities for further developing and benchmarking, and (2) provides metrics that help the analysis of the performance of a team of agents during the disaster. Our simulator is based on software made available by the multi-agent programming contest, which over the years has provided challenging problems to be solved by intelligent agents. We evaluate the performance of our simulator in terms of processing time and memory usage, message exchange, and response time. We apply this analysis to two different approaches for dealing with the mining dam disaster that occurred in Brazil in 2019. Our results show that our simulator is robust and can work with a reasonable number of agents.
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Notes
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Photo in our context is an abstraction that represents a further investigation that must be carried out in order to find out whether a victim is or is not hidden under the mud. Usually, experts may use some device that provides data that must be analysed to draw a conclusion.
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Fake agents are agents that do not perform any reasoning; they just send a predefined action at each step.
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Although we compare the two approaches to show how to use our metrics, our main goal does not lie to state which approach is better.
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As our main goal is not to evaluate the technique itself but to demonstrate how to compare different approaches, we omit implementation details.
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Krausburg, T., Chrisosthemos, V., Bordini, R.H., Dix, J. (2020). Disaster Response Simulation as a Testbed for Multi-Agent Systems. In: Bassiliades, N., Chalkiadakis, G., de Jonge, D. (eds) Multi-Agent Systems and Agreement Technologies. EUMAS AT 2020 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12520. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66412-1_5
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