So… the Taipei City government held another meeting to review Farglory’s disaster evacuation simulation.
Farglory still failed to come up with several simulations, including one for the worst case scenario. At one point of the meeting, Farglory conceded to making adjustments to allow people more time during evacuation.
However, the head of the Urban Development Bureau, Huang Jing-mao (黃景茂), who has been favoring Farglory since he replaced renowned architect Lin Jou-min, forced to let Farglory pass without committing to any future changes, or future review of new modifications, disregarding protests from city councilors.
The simulations has been a major point of conflict between Farglory, and the city government. Four years ago, Lin Jou-min led Urban Development Bureau wanted the simulation to be run with the SimTread software, but Farglory insisted they would only use the EXODUS software.
Since Lin’s removal, Farglory has been granted to only use EXODUS for their simulations, but now they blame the requirements for the worst case scenario too unrealistic, causing EXODUS to stall and crash.
The worst case scenario included a couple parameters:
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Impatience to be turned on. When impatience is on, simulated people would be rushing ahead, disregarding congestions.
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Familiarity to be turned off. According to the makers of EXODUS, when familiarity is turned on, simulated people would be assigned random number of familiarity, which affects how fast they are able to make route decisions at each juncture. When turned all, every single simulated person would have 0 familiarity with the escape routes.
Farglory claims these settings are crashing the software, and the makers of the EXODUS came out with this statement:
In the statement the makers of EXODUS simply states that the program is currently not optimized for both of these settings to be turned on, therefore the program would run very slowly, but the program hasn’t crashed. The makers of the program also stated that turning both on may or may not be appropriate for the intended scenario, and did not out right said these parameters shouldn’t be turned on at the same time.
From my perspective, I think in an emergency situation in Taiwan, impatience should absolutely be on, and familiarity if not completely off, should have a larger ratio simulated people assigned with low values.
That’s not even the worse case scenario, that’s just a Tuesday on this island.
As for Farglory, they cannot shove the program of their choice, force everyone to accept it, then complain about how the program is running too slow.
Yet apparently they can because they got a man in the city government.