Design of a GIS-based Assistant Software Agent for the Incident Commander to Coordinate Emergency Response Operations
This addresses coordination challenges for incident commanders in emergency response, but it is incremental as it proposes a design framework without implementation or validation.
The paper tackled the design of an intelligent software system, GICoordinator, to assist incident commanders in coordinating emergency response operations, resulting in an architecture that integrates GIS and AI techniques for strategic planning and macro task assignment.
Problem: This paper addresses the design of an intelligent software system for the IC (incident commander) of a team in order to coordinate actions of agents (field units or robots) in the domain of emergency/crisis response operations. Objective: This paper proposes GICoordinator. It is a GIS-based assistant software agent that assists and collaborates with the human planner in strategic planning and macro tasks assignment for centralized multi-agent coordination. Method: Our approach to design GICoordinator was to: analyze the problem, design a complete data model, design an architecture of GICoordinator, specify required capabilities of human and system in coordination problem solving, specify development tools, and deploy. Result: The result was an architecture/design of GICoordinator that contains system requirements. Findings: GICoordinator efficiently integrates geoinformatics with artifice intelligent techniques in order to provide a spatial intelligent coordinator system for an IC to efficiently coordinate and control agents by making macro/strategic decisions. Results define a framework for future works to develop this system.