An Emotional Agent Model for the Simulation of Realistic Civilian Behaviors during Emergency Situations

Abstract

Analyzing human behaviors during emergency situations contributes to build efficient emergency management plans. Indeed, research shows that emotions have a major influence on human behavior particularly to respond to highly emotive events such as those happening in emergency situations. Therefore, it is recognized that they are necessary to produce human-like behaviors in artificial agents. In this paper, we present an emotional agent model of human civilians in an emergency context. The aim is to model and to simulate the emotion generation process and the impact of the elicited emotions on civilian behaviors in an emergency situation during a disaster.

Modeling and Simulation of Coping Mechanisms and Emotional Behavior During Emergency Situations

“…In previous works, we have proposed an emotional BDI agent model [7,8]. The latter makes use of our computational model of emotions outlined in [9] that is based on the OCC model of emotions [10].…”

“…Finally, the appraisal of objects triggers Attitude-based emotions. The appraisers compute emotion intensities according to our computational model of emotions (Details about the different formula we use to compute emotion intensities along with the implementation results of the emotion generation process within the agent are provided in [7][8][9]). The output of the appraisal process is an emotional state that affects the agent goals and orients its BDI-based action selection process.…”

“…In this paper, we adopt the psychological theory of coping proposed by Roseman [3] to model and simulate coping mechanisms in stressful situations. Particularly, we integrate a coping mechanism into our emotional agent model [7,8]. The agent model makes use of a computational model of emotions we proposed in [9] that is based-on the OCC model [10].…”

“…We aim to study the impact of the generated emotions on the agent action selection process. The coping model is implemented within the emotional agent based social simulation of civilians in an emergency situation [7,8]. The civilian simulator is integrated into the RoboCupRescue (RCR) simulation system [11], which is an agent-based simulator of an emergency situation after an earthquake.…”