Bushfire BLOCKS

The project is funded with assistance of the Australian Government Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency's Climate Change Adaptation Research Grants program.


Project Description:
The goal of this project is to develop a modular agent based simulation platform, that allows emergency management stakeholders to explore complex multi-scalar, multi-actor, emergency management interactions under uncertain future conditions, in order to promote more effective governance arrangements. The platform is also intended to be a long term decision support tool suitable for the development of agent based simulations which address a range of extreme events, such as coastal flooding, heat stress, etc.


The platform and expertise that will be developed are part of the broader work that explores the use of Agent Based Modeling and Simulation in the area of Climate Change Adaptation, specifically the ARC Discovery Project ''An Extensible Agent-Based Framework for Exploring Climate Change Adaptation''. The ARC project aims to develop an interactive agent simulation framework that allows the creation of complex simulations by incrementally adding new agent-based models created by members of a large distributed community for exploring city based issues of climate change adaptation. The Bushfire BLOCKS project also has as its technical core, an extendible agent based simulation framework. The ARC project is more theoretical in nature with a far smaller application component. This project on the other hand is very much applied research where many of the particular technical questions addressed will depend substantially on the needs of the application as it is defined and developed – along with the longer term objective of building a reusable resource.


Preliminary work on the Bushfire BLOCKS simulation platform and the framework for integrating agent-based simulations as a single global simulation were presented as a demo and a poster at the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010). See under Publications below for a link to the papers.

Participants: Lin Padgham, Darryn McEvoy, Karyn Bosomworth, Dave Scerri, Sarah Hickmott, Gaya Jayatilleke
Collaborators: Fabio Zambetta


Related Publications

  • Bushfire BLOCKS: A Modular Agent-based Simulation, D. Scerri, S. Hickmott, F. Zambetta, F. Gouw, I. Yehuda and L. Padgham, Proc. of 9th Int. Conf. on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010), van der Hoek, Kaminka, Luck and Sen (eds.), May, 10–14, 2010, Toronto, Canada (system demonstration) pdf
  • An Architecture for Modular Distributed Simulation with Agent-Based Models, D. Scerri, S. Hickmott, Alexis Drogoul and L. Padgham, Proc. of 9th Int. Conf. on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010), van der Hoek, Kaminka, Luck and Sen (eds.), May, 10–14, 2010, Toronto, Canada (poster) pdf

Software
We have developed a software simulation in consultation with staff at CFA, which shows a potential bushfire in Black Saturday or Ash Wednesday conditions, converging on the coastal town of Brimlea. To develop this simulation we have integrated fire data from the Phoenix fire simulator, traffic data using the agent based traffic simulator MATSim, and people's individual decision making using a purpose built module. The software and associated documentation, describing how to use the software for a different location, can be downloaded here as a zipfile. BushfireSim. There is a Readme file included in the zipfile, and it is also available here.

Video
A short video explaining and demonstrating our simulation is shown here:



A QuickTime version of this video can be downloaded from here. (Right click and select 'Save as..." to save to your computer)

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