The development of agent based modelling framework for simulating disaster response teamwork

• Main Authors: Salihu, Kado Zaharaddeen, Ibrahim, Roliana, Mohamed Khaidzir, Khairul Anwar
• Format: Article
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
• Online Access: http://eprints.utm.my/id/eprint/40801/
• Institution: Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

The humans and their environmental health safety has always become the most important aspect in human life’s especially in towards the issues of the effects/threats of vulnerable risk, which causes devastation/destruction to humans health and their ecological regions such as disaster which is a hazard. A disaster is a consequences combination of a natural or artificial hazards and as well human factors that were vulnerable to be caused by the lack of in appropriate disaster management plans, which yield as well leads to financial, infrastructural, economical, social and human damages or destructions. Teamwork has always becoming massively important in the organizations due to its beneficial outcomes. Although a team performance levels were been determined by the complexity of interactions between the attributes of its individual members, the communication and dynamics between team’s members, the working environment, and the team’s working tasks. As the organizations evolved, so too does their interactive nature of the team working. During the past two decades, the field development in some agencies and organizations has become increasingly been undertaken by the integrated product unit teams. Such increasing complexity means that the interactive nature of the research methods for studying teamwork must also evolved as a good research area of study. Accordingly, this paper highlight and proposes the used of an agent-based modeling (ABS) concept of approach for simulating teamwork within a disaster environment, this informed by the research conducted on organizational units and their simulating agents. The model parameters concept includes the number of agent variables behavior at each levels, i.e individual level (competency, motivation, availability, response rate), team level (communication, shared mental models, trust), and task level (difficulty, workflow), which jointly determine teamwork performance (quality, time to complete the task, time spent working on the task). However, this paper will also discusses and elaborate the ABS model, and the current practice in which the model is predominantly used to manage/control disaster management. In resolving the issues identified, an ABS approach to agent-parameters behavior is been proposed to modeled the emergence cases of team working simulation, where the team members work cooperatively depends on the communication of agents in the simulation environment known as agents or parameters. It then analyses the processes by behavior of these parameters as intelligent agent’s entities, which were going to be used in development of the ABS model.