A formal agent-based personalised mobile system to support emergency response
Abstract
Communication may be seen as a process of sending and accepting information among
individuals. It is a vital part of emergency response management, sharing the
information of situations, victims, family and friends, rescue organisations and others.
The obtained contextual information during a disaster event, however, is often dynamic,
partial and may be conflicting with each other. Current communication strategies and
solutions for emergency response have limitations - in that they are often designed to
support information sharing between organisations and not individuals. As a result, they
are often not personalisable. They also cannot make use of opportunistic resources, e.g.
people nearby the disaster-struck areas that are ready to help but are not a part of any
organisation. However, history has told us such people are often the first responders that
provide the most immediate and useful help to the victims.
On the other hand, the advanced and rich capabilities of mobile smartphones
have become one of the most interesting topics in the field of mobile technologies and
applied science. It is especially interesting when it can be expanded to become an
effective emergency response tool to discover affected people and connect them with
the first responders and their families, friends and communities. At present, research on
emergency response is ineffective for handling large-scale disasters where professional
rescuers could not reach victims in disaster struck-areas immediately. This is because
current approaches are often built to support formal emergency response teams and
organizations. Individual emergency response efforts, e.g. searching for missing people
(inc. families and friends), are often web-based applications that are also not effective.
Other works focus on sensory development that lacks integrated search and rescue
approaches.
In this thesis, I developed a distributed and personalisable Mobile Kit Disaster
Assistant (MKA) system that is underpinned by a formal foundation. It aims at
gathering emergency response information held by multiple resources before, during
and after a large-scale disaster. As a result, contextual and background information
based on a formal framework would be readily available, if a disaster indeed strikes. To
this end, my core contribution is to provide a structural formal framework to
encapsulate important information that is used to support emergency response at a personal level. Several (conceptual) structures were built to allow an individual to
express his/her own individual circumstances, inc. relationships with others and health
status that will determine how he/she may communicate with others.
The communication framework is consisting of several new components: a rich
and holistic Emergency Response Communication Framework, a newly developed
Communication and Tracking Ontology (CTO), a newly devised Emergency Response
Agent Communication Language (ER-ACL) and a brand-new Emergency Response
Agent Communication Protocol (ER-ACP). I have framed the emergency response
problem as a multi-agent problem where each smartphone would act as an agent for its
user; each user would take on a role depending on requirements and/or the tasks at hand
and the above framework is aimed to be used within a peer to peer distributed multiagent system (MAS) to assist emergency response efforts.
Based on this formal framework, I have developed a mobile application, the
MKA system, to capture important features of EM and to demonstrate the practicalities
and value of the proposed formal framework. This system was carefully evaluated by
both domain experts and potential users of targeted user groups using both qualitative
and quantitative approaches. The overall results are very encouraging. Evaluators
appreciated the importance of the tool and believe such tools are vital in saving lives –
that is applicable for large-scale disasters as well as for individual life-critical events.