Abstract:
In developed countries such as Australia, for recurring disasters (e.g. floods), there are dedicated document repositories of Disaster Management Plans (DISPLANs), and supporting doctrine and processes that are used to prepare organisations and communities for disasters. They are maintained on an ongoing cyclical basis and form a key information source for community education, engagement and awareness programme in the preparation for and mitigation of disasters. DISPLANS, generally in semi-structured text document format, are then accessed and activated during the response and recovery to incidents to coordinate emergency service and community safety actions. However, accessing the appropriate plan and the specific knowledge within the text document from across its conceptual areas in a timely manner and sharing activities between stakeholders requires intimate domain knowledge of the plan contents and its development. This paper describes progress on an ongoing project with NSW State Emergency Service (NSW SES) to convert DISPLANs into a collection of knowledge units that can be stored in a unified repository with the goal to form the basis of a future knowledge sharing capability. All Australian emergency services covering a wide range of hazards develop DISPLANs of various structure and intent, in general the plans are created as instances of a template, for example those which are developed centrally by the NSW and Victorian SES’s State planning policies. In this paper, we illustrate how by using selected templates as part of an elaborate agent-based process, we can apply agent-oriented analysis more efficiently to convert extant DISPLANs into a centralised repository. The repository is structured as a layered abstraction according to Meta Object Facility (MOF). The work is illustrated using DISPLANs along the flood-prone Murrumbidgee River in central NSW.
