Modelling Agents with Uml: an Example in Building Security Evalution

This paper proposes some extensions to UML for agent-based modelling and simulation, where the agents follow either a purely reactive or a hybrid layered approach (reactivity combined with proactivity). The extensions include notations for sensors, effectors and agent’s capabilities and their specification in a formal way. In this work, agent-based simulation is also proposed as a method to help in the evaluation of security in buildings by simulating their evacuation. These simulations allow us to measure evacuation time of different scenarios, to play with different structural properties of the building and test their influence in the building security, which can be useful during its design. In these simulations, people are represented by means of agents using a hybrid layered approach. The lower layer deals with collision avoidance and doors’ visualization, while the higher layer builds models of the environment (rooms’ connectivity) to help the agent find the exit. Buildings are conceptually modelled as graphs where vertices and edges represent rooms and doors respectively. Rooms are discretized and represented as two-dimensional grids, in which agents can move. keywords: Agent-Based Simulation, Hybrid Agents, UML, Building Safety, Crowd Simulation.