Provenance of decisions in emergency response environments

Abstract

Mitigating the devastating ramifications of major disasters requires emergency workers to respond in a maximally efficient way. Information systems can improve their efficiency by organizing their efforts and automating many of their decisions. However, absence of documenting how decisions were made by the system prevents decisions from being reviewed to check the reasons for their making or their compliance with policies. We apply the concept of provenance to decision making in emergency response situations and use the Open Provenance Model to express provenance produced in RoboCup Rescue Simulation. We produce provenance DAGs using a novel OPM profile that conceptualizes decisions in the context of emergency response. Finally, we traverse the OPM DAGs to answer some provenance questions about those decisions. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.