3D Simulation of Suicide Bombing – Using Computers to Save Lives

Abstract

This paper asks a new question: how, as computer scientists, we can save the lives of the people living in the troubled areas of the world where suicide bombing and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) explosions become routine incidents in daily lives. How we can utilize the power of modeling and simulation and the advantages of agents based simulation to create a virtual environment to run and test the suicide bombing incidents. And to gain valuable insights on geometrical arrangements, and crowd formations and densities to find out the optimum and safest crowd formations. Which when followed will minimize the number of deaths and injuries during a suicide bombing attack. This paper presents the science of suicide bombing under the framework of agent based simulation. It also explains the physics, explosive models, mathematics and the assumptions we need to create such a simulation. The work also describes human shields available in the crowd with partial and full coverage in both 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional environments. A virtual simulation tool has been developed which is capable of assessing the impact of crowd formation patterns and their densities on the magnitude of injury and number of casualties during a suicide bombing attack. Results indicated that the worst crowd formation is street (Zig-Zag) where 30% crowd can be dead and 45% can be injured, given typical explosive carrying capacity of a single suicide bomber. Row wise crowd formations was found to be the best for reducing the effectiveness of an attack with 18% crowd in lethal zone and 38% in injury zones. For a typical suicide bombing attack, we can reduce the number of fatalities by 12%, and the number of injuries by 7% by simply following the recommendations in this paper. Simulation results were compared and validated by the real-life incidents and found to be in good agreement. Line-of-sight with the attacker, rushing towards the exit, and stampede were found to be the most lethal choices both during and after the attack. These findings, although preliminary, may have implications for emergency response and counter terrorism.