MOBEDIC - A decision modelling tool for emergency situations

In this paper we desribe a software tool that we have developed for modelling the decisions that people make in emergency situations in offshore environments. The tool was developed using C + + and runs on a PC under MS Windows. It has a generic architecture and can be easily extended to other environments with different characteristics, e.g. hospitals, 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 hazardous situations and help evaluate the effectiveness of emergency procedures 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 modelling tool to incorporate both decision making and movement modelling. Our work is therefore an important step in the introduction of improved approaches to the evaluation of offshore safety management. Validating 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 emergency scenario and the results were encouraging. In the future we would like to enhance our model by incorporating communication between personnel. This would allow us to model complex scenarios, especially those that cannot be simulated realistically in training exercises.