MOBEDIC - A DECISION MODELING TOOL FOR EMERGENCY SITUATIONS

In this paper we desribe a software tool that we have developed for mo delling the decisions that people make in emergency situations in offs hore environments. The tool was developed using C + + and runs on a PC under MS Windows. It has a generic architecture and can be easily ext ended to other environments with different characteristics, e.g. hospi tals, commercial buildings, etc. We use frames to represent a person's characteristics and their perception of the environment; scripts are used to define typical behaviours for particular situations. Our tool can be used to predict the likely behaviours of a population in hazard ous situations and help evaluate the effectiveness of emergency proced ures and training. We have worked with our collaborators to integrate our decision model with their model of people's movement to produce a system that can realistically simulate emergency scenarios on offshore structures. We believe that this is the first egress and evacuation m odelling tool to incorporate both decision making and movement modelli ng. Our work is therefore an important step in the introduction of imp roved approaches to the evaluation of offshore safety management. Vali dating the decision model proved difficult because of lack of suitable data. We acquired additional data by interviewing offshore personnel and monitoring a mustering exercise. We then simulated an offshore eme rgency scenario and the results were encouraging. In the future we wou ld like to enhance our model by incorporating communication between pe rsonnel. This would allow us to model complex scenarios, especially th ose that cannot be simulated realistically in training exercises.