A Multi-agent System for Dynamic Path Planning

Escape route planning in emergency situations generates interest among researches in many different areas. Computer Science contributes to this by developing simulations of real world situations. An escape route can be regarded as a weighted graph where the labels associated with its edges are determined by the distance between two connected vertexes. Hence, given a starting vertex, it is possible to obtain the minimum path to one exit in the environment. Classical algorithms, such as Dijkstra´s, can solve this problem. However, when the environment changes in real time, this class of algorithms is not efficient. Using Multi-agent Systems to solve this problem dynamically seems to be a good approach to plan escape routes in real time, given new information about the environment when modification are detected. This research exposes this approach, implementing a multi agent communication system in a 3D virtual environment.