A New Opportunity to Urban Evacuation Analysis: Very Large Scale Simulations of Social Agent Systems in Repast HPC

Due to catastrophic disasters induced by forces of nature like flooding or tsunamis, terrorism or nuclear power plant accidents, understanding the dynamics of urban evacuation systems has elicited massive interest over the past years. While discrete event simulations of evacuation models become prohibitively complex dealing with the time, space and individual behavior, multiagent based models have revealed to be a potentially more effective. This paper introduces models of configurations of social agents at a massive scale, which, together with the most recent supercomputing technology, allows for a simulation analysis of realistic evacuation models at the level of large cities (10⁶ -10⁸ agents). Agent based models of demographics and the morphology of cities together with population densities, mobility patterns, individual decision making, and agent interactions are implemented into a tool chain which ultimately generates Repast HPC code, which is then executed on a 2,048 node shared memory multiprocessor server (SGI Altix UV-1000). We demonstrate how different evacuation strategies can be assessed based on costly, yet feasible simulation runs - thus evidencing, that a whole class of demanding, very complex simulation problems has found a convincing solution.