Conceptual modeling in disaster planning using agent constructs

Abstract

A disaster plan contains rules to be used by responders to deal with a disaster and save lives. Usually, the plan is not enacted by those who created it. This results in difficulty for responders in utilizating the plan. Conceptual models have been used to gain a better understanding of disaster plans. Unfortunately, the conceptual modeling grammars used to create these conceptual models focus only on the external view of the responders and how they interact with one another; they do not represent the internal view (e.g., assumptions and reasoning) used in their decision making. Without representing the internal view, responders will not know, for example, whether the objective assumed by planners is appropriate for their specific situation. In this paper, we propose to overcome this problem by utilizing constructs from the intelligent agent literature since they can represent roles, interactions, assumptions, and decision-making. To understand the practicality and usefulness of conceptually representing both external and internal views of different roles in a disaster plan, we performed a case study on the role in the disaster plan of a local Emergency Operations Centre (EOC). The results of the case study show that conceptual modeling using agent constructs has great potential for aiding disaster responders in understanding disaster plans. Because of the model, the assumptions that were hidden in the plan can now be extracted and shown to disaster responders and the efficacy of a plan can be evaluated before it needs to be enacted. © Springer-Verlag 2009.