An agent-based simulation application on a multi-agent firefighting and rescue system

An agent-based simulation model is developed to model the organizational behavior of a firefighting team. Our research interest focuses on the relationship between the distribution of authority in the firefighting team and its team performance. There are two types of authority distribution factors: self-managing factor and supervisor-centered factor. We found that a high team performance can be obtained when the self-managing factor is in the state of self-managing and the supervisor-centered factor is in the state of supervisor-centered. We also found that the self-managing factor has a major impact on the team performance.