A Guidance System for Wide-area Complex Disaster Evacuation based on Ant Colony Optimization

This paper reports the results of applying our approach discovering safe evacuation routes to practical situations. Our approach is based on the ant colony optimization (ACO) and it is practical in the light of a real case with a tsunami. ACO have been often employed for finding evacuation routes in traditional approaches, which only take advantage of ants behavior more frequently following traces of other ants’ through pheromone communications. We assume that there are a lot of danger zones in the damaged area. For example Rikuzentakata is a city that extensively damaged in the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. In such a case, the traditional approaches may present some unsafe routes through the danger zones. We have proposed an ACO based approach that calculates evacuation routes avoiding danger zones. In our approach, evacuees can deposit deodorant pheromone around danger zones, which makes normal pheromone ineffective, so that our approach gives routes not passing through the danger zones. We have implemented our approach as a simulator, conducting experiments in the same situation as the Rikuzentakata case. Through the results of the experiments, we show that our approach decreases the number of people suffering from collapsed and burning buildings.