Urban Safety and Resilience: Agent-Based Modelling Simulations for Pre-disaster Planning

One of the issues that today’s urban planner is probably called upon to question is the ability to succeed in shaping a dynamic approach to be able to deal with the challenges and events that contemporary life presents us with by placing oneself in a position that is not always easy and trying to develop methodologies and implement innovative tools that can support planning practice. The research presented in this article addresses, in this context, the issue of pre-disaster planning and focuses on simulation regarding crowd movement at the urban level (and beyond, as will be expounded more extensively in the text) based on algorithmically determined risk scenarios. The methodology is based on the use of an agent-oriented programming language that offers the possibility to build integrated models with different modelling paradigms, explore parameter space, calibrate them, and perform virtual experiments by integrating vector and raster geospatial data. The goal is thus to verify, downstream of these simulations, performance characteristics and endowments of parts of cities about their ability to respond to the occurrence of a natural disaster, but above all, it will be to define new urban design techniques oriented toward safety and thus increasing the resilience of our cities. The article presents the first results of the research about a case study on which the methodology being developed was applied.