Agent-based simulation systems for emergency management

Emergencies, which are very difficult to be forecasted, would always bring about huge harm to people. Therefore, to find ways to reduce such devastating effects, researches on emergency management have turned to be paramount. Nowadays, the rapid development of computer technology has supplied a new and effective idea for the researches of emergency management, namely that the researches can be done in computers by performing simulation experiments according to the artificial societies, computational experiments, parallel execution (ACP) approach. Guided by this approach, this paper has proposed one agent-based prototype simulation system to research emergency management. Firstly, structure of the simulation system oriented to emergency management was analyzed and designed. Then a simulation system oriented to public health emergency management was constructed to study the transmission of infectious diseases. Finally, several experiments were carried out based on the system, with several significant conclusions having also been obtained. © 2016, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.