An agent-based framework to model integration for disaster emergency management

Abstract

Model integration is a core issue in the field of disaster emergency management. Models are extremely significant and intelligent resource to improve the ability of decision making in order to alleviate the disaster impacts. Traditionally, practical approach to integrate those models into system is tight-coupling with data sources which lacks of flexibility and re-usability. To cope with this problem, we propose an agentbased loose-coupling framework to model integration and execution for disaster emergency management. We encapsulate models and related, heterogeneous data sources into a standard form using a formal specification. Based on the loose-coupling framework and the standard form, we design a model executing process, which can be divided into five phases and follows the request-reply architecture. Finally, we briefly give a case study based on a real disaster situation: Lu Shan County earthquake in China, to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency regarding the proposed framework.