Information Exchange on MANET for Efficient Evacuation

Abstract

In disaster situations, people need to evacuate from dangerous areas to safe ones. In particular, they must formulate an evacuation plan for themselves when they cannot obtain support. Communicating with other evacuees to obtain information is useful in formulating an evacuation plan, and some studies have used a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) for this purpose, because such a network can be constructed using only wireless devices even when a fatal situation arises. However, we cannot treat a MANET in the same manner as other networks (such as a carrier network or Wi-Fi), and MANETs have several shortcomings in regard to information exchange. It is necessary to investigate the effects of these limitations on creating evacuation support systems on a MANET. We evaluated whether the limited information exchange available using a MANET is sufficient to create evacuation support systems through the use of a multi-agent evacuation simulator. As a result, our simulator showed that limited communication in which people communicate only with neighbors provides substantial efficiency for evacuation. People can continue to evacuate effectively even if they cannot obtain all of the desired information owing to MANET limitations.