Analysis of Shipboard Firefighting-Team Efficiency Using Intelligent-Agent Simulation
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Authors
Andrade, Sylvio F.
Rowe, Neil C.
Gaver, Donald P.
Jacobs, Patricia A.
Subjects
Advisors
Date of Issue
2002-06
Date
June 2002
Publisher
Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School
Language
Abstract
Analysis of the efficiency of organizational structures is important for command-and-control since an
intuitively appealing structure may have unanticipated bottlenecks that occur with unexpected events and the
skill levels of personnel. Good simulation can find some of these problems, but it hard to build good
simulations. So we have developed tools to enable analysts to set up discrete-event multi-agent simulations
in straightforward ways without having to program. We describe here our application of these tools to
shipboard firefighting, which presents difficult problems for planners. Our tools uses artificial-intelligence
techniques such as means-ends analysis to simulate the actions and interactions of a fire team, and uses a
stochastic model for fire spread based on the kind of flammable material, its ignition and burnout rates, and
the possibility of burnout and flashover effects. The duration of an action depends on the skill level of the
team member in charge of the action. To assess the readiness of teams with different combinations of skills,
we measured the duration of firefighting in random trials. We showed that a good scene leader is not
sufficient to assure a good performance when unskilled nozzlemen and hosemen are part of the team, and we
showed that skill levels did not matter much when ignition and burnout rates were high.
Type
Conference Paper
Description
Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium, Monterey CA, June 2002
Series/Report No
Department
Computer Science (CS)
Operations Research (OR)
Organization
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NPS Report Number
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Citation
Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium, Monterey CA, June 2002
Distribution Statement
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defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.