Construction of navigational maps for evacuees in disaster areas based on ant colony systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a construction system of navigational maps for evacuees in disaster areas. The navigational maps let evacuees know the current situations of disaster areas: namely, which roads can be used for evacuation, which paths is the shortest to shelters, and so on. In this system, in order to acquire up-to-minute information on road condition in the area, evacuees with mobile devices record roads chosen for evacuation to the shelter as data collection agents. Furthermore, in order to take recentness of information into account, collected road information is restructured into a navigational map based on a mechanism of ant colony systems. By this method, more recently used roads are treated as safer roads for evacuation. In the simulation experiments, we can observe that the proposed map construction system can follow changing situation and provide an up-to-minute safe-road map to a shelter in a disaster area. In addition, we can also clarify that navigational maps provided by our system can reduce evacuation time to shelters in disaster areas.