Towards a common vocabulary for crisis management scenarios

Abstract

Crisis management is a complex process, handling critical situations caused by natural or human-made hazards. In the response phase, crisis managers often have limited time to react on unexpected events. Hence, sufficient training during the preparedness phase of crisis management plays a vital role for correct behaviours under time pressure. Significant efforts in the research community have been invested to develop innovative IT-based crisis management training systems with one core idea in mind – create crisis scenarios with sufficient details for the targeted training purposes to better prepare crisis managers. Developing such scenarios is however a time-consuming process and involves contributing a vast amount of human efforts by crisis managers, domain experts and system engineers. Therefore, improved re-usability of well-developed and validated scenarios is of critical importance for crisis management training. To our best knowledge, a widely-accepted method to describe crisis scenarios in a machine understandable fashion is still missing – training systems are normally equipped with proprietary formats that cannot be easily shared with each other. This paper proposes a common machine-readable vocabulary to describe crisis scenarios. In addition, the corresponding software environment to support the generation and execution of crisis scenarios is also elaborated.