  Bushfires pose a significant threat to Australia's regional areas. To
minimise risk and increase resilience, communities need robust evacuation
strategies that account for people's likely behaviour both before and during a
bushfire. Agent-based modelling (ABM) offers a practical way to simulate a
range of bushfire evacuation scenarios. However, the ABM should reflect the
diversity of possible human responses in a given community. The
Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) cognitive model captures behaviour in a compact
representation that is understandable by domain experts. Within a BDI-ABM
simulation, individual BDI agents can be assigned profiles that determine their
likely behaviour. Over a population of agents their collective behaviour will
characterise the community response. These profiles are drawn from existing
human behaviour research and consultation with emergency services personnel and
capture the expected behaviours of identified groups in the population, both
prior to and during an evacuation. A realistic representation of each community
can then be formed, and evacuation scenarios within the simulation can be used
to explore the possible impact of population structure on outcomes. It is hoped
that this will give an improved understanding of the risks associated with
evacuation, and lead to tailored evacuation plans for each community to help
them prepare for and respond to bushfire.
