BlastSim — Multi agent simulation of suicide bombing

This paper introduces BlastSim — physics based stationary multi-agent simulation of blast waves and its impact on human body. The agents are constrained by physical characteristics and mechanics of blast wave. The simulation is capable of assessing the impact of crowd formation patterns on the magnitude of injury and number of casualties during a suicide bombing attack. It also examines variables such as the number and arrangement of people within a crowd for typical layouts, the number of suicide bombers, and the nature of the explosion including equivalent weight of TNT, and the duration of the resulting blast wave pulse. The paper also explains the physics, explosive models, mathematics and the assumptions we need to create such a simulation. Furthermore, it also describes human shields available in the crowd with partial and full coverage in both two dimensional and three dimensional environments. The goals of this paper are to determine optimal crowd formations to reduce the deaths and/or injuries of individuals in the crowd. The findings, although preliminary, may have implications for forensics investigations, emergency response and counterterrorism.