Hello out there!
Unfortunately, there's not much discussion on the mailing list, yet.
Well, here's another list of possible extensions. This time it's mostly
simple rule or minor code changes.
Please start commenting on these and on the other ones! Which way do you
want this league to go? What are important *visible* changes/extensions
that you want to have that show the progress we are making in this
league? Which rule changes do you want to make the competition more
interesting, more fair, more realistic?
A. Limited space in buildings and prohibition of extinguishing from
inside houses:
It's unrealistic that there is no restriction on the number of agents,
esp. platoons, in buildings. It's even more unrealistic that fire
brigades can extinguish from inside buildings.
Of course, if we make such restrictions, we'll have big traffic jam
problems. So probably there should be a way to give platoons, esp. fire
brigades some more freedom to position themselves. For instance,
1. agents could specify not only a road where they want to move to, but
also a positionExtra on that road, allowing several fire brigades to
choose good positions on the same street that are still in extinguishing
range for a specific building
2. blocking the movements of other agents could be relaxed: each platoon
should only block one *lane*, not the whole road.
B. Refuges and stations burn like other buildings
Apart from being much more realistic, this also emphasizes that
civilians must be protected during the whole simulation and that the
centers as a, well, central part of a team are in danger, too. By the
way, the new fire simulator allows this feature to be switched on and off.
C. Unknown number of civilians
It is an unrealistic feature of the simulation that agents know the
number (and IDs) of civilians in advance. To change this, an upper
bound on the number of civilians could be given to the agents. Thus,
there could be a fixed set of IDs reserved to civilians. Only when a
civilian is actually sensed for the first time, it would become known to
an agent that this civilian really exists.
Side note: this would also allow that civilian agents are created
dynamically by a new civilian simulator (as described in our proposal
from Nov 9). When, for example, the simulator computes that some people
are hurt during a mass panic, it would move from the simple network flow
representation for these civilians to the classic "civs as agents"
representation. These new agents could then be sensed, rescued and
transported to the refuge.
D. Damage on the streets
Both civilians and platoons are quite save on the streets in the current
simulation. If we wanted to change that here's a couple of possibilities:
- small injuries near burning buildings. The new firesim computes heat
distributions also for the streets, so this would be easy.
- civilians being trampeled down during a mass panic. Easy to implement
with a network flow model (as proposed), but maybe also possible in the
old model
- if we had aftershocks, people on the entrance nodes of collapsing
buildings or streets nearby would be in danger of being hit.
So. These are some possible small changes. We've come up with another
one which we'll describe in a separate mail because it is a bit more
fundamental: a change to the way we model perception.
We came up with these proposals in a brainstorming session of less than
two hours. I'm sure that all of you have great ideas that weren't even
mentioned yet. So please, speak up! It is important that we shape the
future of this league *now*.
ResQ Freiburg (Michael)
-- Michael Brenner Phone: (+49) (761) 203-8226 Institute of Computer Science Fax: (+49) (761) 203-8222 Albert-Ludwigs-University mailto:brenner@informatik.uni-freiburg.de Am Flughafen 17, Geb. 52 http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~brenner D-79110 Freiburg, Germany
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