Agent-based simulation for urban emergency response planning

The complexity inherent in urban emergency response brings lots of challenge for decision making. An effective test bed for analyzing the dynamics of emergency response for different scenarios and evaluating the strength of rescue strategies is crucial for improving disaster planning, preparedness and mitigation. Computer simulation is becoming an increasingly important tool which provides an effective and low-cost approach to address this problem. The agent based approach has been accepted in various areas and multi agent systems have constituted one of the key technologies in disaster rescue simulations, since interactions with human activities should be implemented within them. In this paper agent-based disaster simulation system and its components are discussed, is s u es t h at simulation system will have when it is applied for practical usages are also discussed. These discussions will delve into future research topics in developing practical disaster simulation systems.