Get me out of here: collaborative evacuation based on local knowledge

Abstract

Evacuation is one of the most urgent measures of disaster response. It requires spatiotemporal decision making by many individual agents under circumstances that include an unknown impact of the disaster on the environment, which impedes the evacuation planning, and potentially destroyed, blocked or lacking communication infrastructure, which impedes central management. This paper suggests and investigates a novel paradigm for evacuation planning: decentralized planning based on sharing local knowledge. The paradigm is not only independent from infrastructure, and adapts to dynamic disasters, but also is as successful as centralized management in many scenarios.