A Framework to Improve the Disaster Response Through a Knowledge-Based Multi-Agent System

The disaster response still faces problems of collaboration due to lack of policies concerning the information exchange during the response. Moreover, plans are prepared to respond to a disaster, but drills to apply them are limited and do not allow to determine their efficiency and conflicts with other organizations. This paper presents a framework allowing for different organizations involving in the disaster response to assess their collaboration through its simulation using an explicit representation of their knowledge. This framework is based on a multi-agent system composed of three generic agent models to represent the organizational structure of disaster response. The decision-making about response actions is done through task decomposition and repartition. It is based reasoning on ontologies which provides an explicit trace of the response plans design and their execution. Such framework aims at identifying cooperation problems and testing strategies of information exchange to support the preparation of disaster response.