Data Model of the Strategic Action Planning and Scheduling Problem in a Disaster Response Team

Abstract

Problem:Strategic action planning and scheduling (SAP) in the coordination of a disaster response team involves selecting and decomposing an objective into sub-goals, grouping available units into coalitions and assigning them to the sub-goals, allocating units to tasks, and adjusting the decisions that have been made. The primary responsibility of a team’s incident commander (IC) in SAP is to coordinate the actions of operational units in disaster crisis/emergency response management by making macro/strategic decisions.Objective:In this paper, we completely model a real-world problem and present data related to the SAP problem. This data model is used to support the design and development of an appropriate approach to SAP.Method:The employed methodology is to analyze and study the SAP problem, which is composed of six essential dimensions: the problem domain, geographic information, geospatial-temporal macro tasks, strategic action planning, strategic action scheduling, and team structure.Result:The contribution of this paper is the SAP problem data model. It is designed as a unified modeling language (UML) class diagram consisting of entity types, attributes, and relationships associated with SAP problem data modeling.Conclusion:To evaluate the quality of SAP data modeling, the SAP problem data model is used to propose and develop an intelligent assistant software system to assist and collaborate with incident commanders in SAP. The study makes five novel contributions: 1) a complete data model for SAP problem modeling, 2) a presentation and aggregation of task information in geographic objects, 3) the expression and encoding of human intuition as human high-level strategy guidance for SAP, 4) the formulation of a strategic action plan, and 5) the integration of strategic action schedule information with other entities.

Dynamic Assignment of Geospatial-Temporal Macro Tasks to Agents under Human Strategic Decisions for Centralized Scheduling in Multi-Agent Systems

“…This paper applies the SAP data model [20] for the presentation and formulation of the problem. It enables us to design, implement, and develop the proposed algorithm.…”

Intelligent Algorithm for Assignment of Agents to Human Strategy in Centralized Multi-agent Coordination

“…To perform spatially distributed tasks, agents A set of LoTeM tasks (Location-based Temporal Macro tasks) are associated to each road segment. A LoTeM task is an aggregate task of all the tasks with the same task type that are spatially located within a geographic area such as a road segment or city block [13]. Table IV shows that twelve LoTeM tasks are located in the five segments at time 0.…”

“…The problem addressed by this paper has been thoroughly studied and a data model has been designed for formulating the problem [13]. The design of a GIS-based intelligent software system, called GICoordinator, has been proposed for this problem and the requirements of this system have been defined [14].…”

“…Centralized multi-agent coordination is the primary role of the IC. In this role, the IC must make three important decisions: 1) select a global objective and specify a strategy composed of a number of threads that are a set of prioritized sub-problems, 2) strategically allocate agents to these threads, 3) identify an appropriate time to adapt the strategic decision to a new situation by identifying a subset of assigned agents that should be released from their threads and be sent to other threads [13], [14]. Human decisions define the macro behavior of the team because they do not explicitly specify micro actions that should be performed by the agents.…”

Simulation of an Organization of Spatial Intelligent Agents in the Visual C#.NET Framework

“…This spatial intelligent system supports the IC with intelligent algorithms for action planning and task scheduling to centrally coordinate a team in a dynamic and spatial environment [3] , [4]. In addition, it uses a spatial database to manage geographic and location-based information and GIS functions to support the development of these spatial intelligent algorithms [5]. The C# programming language was used to implement the core of the GICoordinator [2].…”