Decision Making Based on Emergency Plan Templates

W. Yu, H. He, and N. Zhang (Eds.): ISNN 2009, Part I, LNCS 5551, pp. 1181–1190, 2009.© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009Decision Making Based on Emergency Plan TemplatesPan Tang, Hongwei Wang, and Wei ZengNational Simulation Training Center for National Economy Mobilization,Huazhong University of Science and Technology,Wuhan 430074, China tangpan001@Abstract. Decision making based on emergency plans is the main mechanismof problem solving in emergency management. According to characteristics ofemergency plan texts, this paper extracts four main components and describesthem with formal models. Based on emergency plan templates, we develop adynamic decision making model to support the normative problem-solvingprocess during emergencies. It provides foundation to develop decision supportsystem for emergency managerst.Keywords: Emergency plan template, Decision making.1 IntroductionEmergencies, including planned events and unexpected incidents, are rare, uncertain, but create sudden and disastrous effects for natural environment and human society, presenting challenges to effective decision making. This makes multiple jurisdictions and disciplines work together for common goals of reducing damages. As an impor-tant part of emergency management, emergency managers must make decisions quickly with limited information and great loads under stress. To overcome these challenges, jurisdictions develop emergency plans, which describe purposes, possible situations, organization and assignment of responsibilities, tactic operations, resources for planned events based on experiences learned before [1]. When emergencies hap-pen, critical and time-sensitive decision making based on emergency plans provide a standard problem-solving model to ensure rational and logical decisions.Developing emergency plans before incidents happening have several key benefits. Firstly, they define possible states and provide probable actions. Therefore, it reduces uncertainty. Secondly, they facilitate us to use default activities rather than reason every time from the beginning, which decreases complexity and load of making deci-sions [2, 3]. Furthermore, it reduces errors induced by high stress on emergency man-agers. Finally, as a common knowledge of all responders involved, it make them coordinate with each other and provide them an explicit model to monitor teammates’ activities in the response process.Unfortunately, emergency plans are textual and unstructured documents. Com-puters cannot extract information and reason action plans based on them to adapt to dynamic emergency situations automatically. To account for that, Adriaan [4] devel-oped an event-based task framework for them, which specifies events, tasks, and dependencies between them explicitly. Mark [5] formally specified emergency plans and compared those using tools from logic languages. Grathwohl [6] used description1182 P. Tang, H. Wang, and W. Zenglogic to model the flood emergency plan and reasoned action plans based on these formal models. Wenjun [7] constructed the emergency plan template ontology model based on ABC ontology, and store them using XML schema. Hongchen [8] proposed an entity and relationship model of organizations, resources and emergency response processes. However, these researchers mainly discussed how to extract components from these texts, formalize and store them in computers. They didn’t discuss charac-teristics and requirements of dynamic decision making procedure based on emergency plans, and how to develop templates to support it. However, it is the goal of formaliz-ing emergency plans indeed.This paper extracts four components from emergency plan text, including inci-dents, organizations, tactic plans and resources, and formalizes them using logic frameworks respectively in section 2. Based on these models, we develop a normative decision making procedure to support the problem-solving processes in the complex and violate emergency situations in section 3. Finally, we conclude the paper and discuss the future work.2 Modeling Emergency PlansJurisdictions and disciplines involving responsibilities of emergency management de-velop Emergency Operations Plans (EOP), Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), and other procedural documents, which constitute a hierarchical and integrated document system, to support decision making during emergencies. These documents called emer-gency plans provide mechanisms to integrate multiple entities and functions, establish collaborative relationships, and ensure coordination of emergency response operations [9]. Decisions, which are made during development of them rather than after emergen-cies happening, can be deliberated, comprehensive and optimal.Fig. 1. Emergency plan templateDecision Making Based on Emergency Plan Templates 1183 Modeling emergency plans is to analyze the structural characteristics of paper-based documents, extract critical components and represent them with standard mod-els, which are called emergency plan templates. Different kinds of emergency plans abstract multiple levels of emergency management businesses, which compliment with each other. Generally, emergency plan specifies incidents and assumed situa-tions, organization structure and assignment of responsibilities, incident objectives, strategies and action plans to accomplish these objectives, available resources and other pertinent data. These characteristics make that it is possible to represent them with common templates. This is shown in fig. 1.We extract four components, including specifications for incidents, emergency or-ganizations, tactic plans and available resources respectively.Emergencyplantemplate={Incidents,EO,TacticPlans,Resources}(1) Incidents are models of planned events and relationships between them. EO speci-fies the organization structure and assigned responsibilities of responders. TacticPlans defines team plans to accomplish incident objectives for involved parties. Finally, pertinent data of available resources are defined in Resources. Based on Emergency-plantemplate, responders work as a team to communicate information, deploy re-sources, execute and modify operation plans for adapting to emergency situations rapidly and reducing damages effectively during emergencies.2.1 Modeling IncidentsIncidents, which occur due to uncontrolled changes in the environment, always breakout unpredicted and evolve rapidly. Emergency managers must assess them accurately based on pertinent information and identify possible situations. While developing emergency plans, they analyze characteristics of incidents and assume possible situations. Formalizing and organizing information about them with common templates provide a simple and general representation to support information commu-nicating in the response process [10]. They consist of a set of problem parameters delineating incidents, which are needed to access situations and predict probable courses. Furthermore, when an incident happens, there are usually several other inci-dents caused by it. We usually call it “incident chains”.Generally, incidents and assumed situations are specified by a set of attributes and assigned reference values according to definitions in objection oriented programming language.Incidents={incident(attribute, referValue)}(2)iIncidentsRelationships={incidentsRelationship=(incidentA,incidentB)}j(3)L∈i,j=1n;incidentA,incidentB IncidentsAttributes of incidents are the type, the occurring time, involved people, the impact area, and physical parameters, which is specified for different incidents. IncidentsRe-lationship s define causalities among them. For example, the physical attributes of flood are the water level, the flux, and so on. The referValue are the maximal value, minimal value, and other possible values assigned to them.1184 P. Tang, H. Wang, and W. Zeng2.2 Modeling the Emergency OrganizationDuring emergencies, personals from multiple parties assemble an organization to achieve the common goal of minimizing damages. Emergency plans provide an ex-plicit organization model for them to establish, expand, and contract the emergency team rapidly and improve coordination effectively in the complex and dynamic task environment. It specifies organization members, relationships among them, and as-signed responsibilities, which provides information about the organization awareness for responders to improve team coherence and effectiveness under assumed situations. Generally, emergency organization model specifies a set of roles and relationships between them.EO ={Roles, RoleRelationships} (4)Roles in Roles are abstracted from emergency response operations, and represent a set of tasks and responsibilities. They are fundamental elements of the organization model and must be staffed once they’re activated. RoleRelationships consists of two types of relationships between roles, which define the social structure of these roles, including CommandandControlRelationship and CommunicationRelationship .i CommandandControlRelationship ={CmdCtrl (roleA, roleB, )},i =1n;φL (5) Responders assigned to roleA can delegate authority to other responders assigned to roleB for executing the command described in φ. It defines orderly line of author-ity with ranks in the organization, which is used to communicate directions and main-tain management control.{(, ,,)}i CommunicationRelationship Commu Rolesender Rolereceiver ,i=1n;φϕ=L (6) It describes reporting relationships between responders assigned to roles in Roles . Rolesender sends a message φ to Rolereceiver under given conditions ϕ. The mes-sage φ is real-time information about incidents, environment and response process. Executing communicating activities under conditions ϕ avoid information over-whelming.Previous works, particularly in Incident Command System (ICS) [10], define a common organization structure designed for emergency management activities from small to complex incidents. Incident commander, operation section chief, planning section chief, logistics section chief, and finance section chief, consisting of the inci-dent management team, are the most important roles. Each of them takes on specific incident response activities and commands his/her subordinators. The incident commanders at the highest rank position within ICS, is responsible for determining objectives, activating the organization models, ordering and coordinating responding agencies based on situations assessment. The planning section chief, assisting the incident commander in the tactic level, collects, evaluates, and disseminates informa-tion about incidents, develops action plans and monitors the implementing process to accomplish those incident objectives. The other roles at the operation level, account for executing assigned tasks, providing facilities and services, managing the cost, and so on.Decision Making Based on Emergency Plan Templates 11852.3 Modeling Tactic PlansBased on the organization model, emergency plans define standardized routines, policies and instructions for organization members, which are called tactic plans. Abstracted from experiences learned from previous disaster relief operations, they specify the determined action plans for emergency response. Due to critical time con-straints, responders don’t have enough time to communicate and negotiate exten-sively. Fortunately, explicit models of tactic plans improve implicit coordination effectively, and make operations robust and reliable for flexible organization and complex environment.While developing tactic plans, emergency managers must analyze incident objectives based on evaluation of assumed situations, and define alternative strategies conformed to them under different constraints. Finally, they continue to program a list of action plans to accomplish these strategies until concise and simple actions for each organization unit are got. Therefore, tactic plans consist of incident objectives, strategies, actions, relevant contexts and constraints to take on them.As the key work of formalizing emergency plans, there are several requirements of developing the logic framework for tactic plans. Firstly, it is multiple levels of response operations for each organization units defined in EO . Secondly, because of the complexity, tacticPlans can’t specify all the details. It should provide the stan-dard fields for determined characteristics of tasks and relationships, and custom fields for specified information, which will be instantiated by the real time informa-tion. Finally, it should provide alternative strategies to accomplish a task to overcome contingencies. Therefore, the overall task structure of tactic plans is top-down, contingent and partial structuring. Nodes in the structure are complex tasks and simple tasks, which are formalized based on joint intension model and parallel the SharedPlans theory [11].Generally, incident objectives, strategies and actions, which have alternative solution methods to accomplish them, are represented by complex tasks. Actions performed in a straightforward, prescriptive manner by executing a direct action, are formalized using simple tasks. Complex task is specified by: (a) name; (b)role, having the responsibility to execute it; (c)priority; (d) preconditions, un-der which the node can be spitted; (e) {AND,OR}Connector ∈,specifying relationships between the node and its sub nodes;(f)sub nodes and (g) end time. In the same way, simple task is defined by: (a) name; (b) role; (c) a list of input parameters and (d) a list of output parameters, specifying its effects. Additionally, these are precedence constraints between these nodes described in Constraints. For exam-ple, nodeB can’t be executed until nodeA is finished.i j k TacticPlans ={complexTask ,simpleTask ,constraints }(,,,,,,)i i i i i i i i ComplexTask name role priority precondition connector subnodes endTime =(,,,)j j j j j SimpleTask name role inputParas outParas = (,),,,k Constraits nodeA nodeB i j k 1n ==L(7)1186 P. Tang, H. Wang, and W. Zeng2.4 Modeling ResourcesEmergency plans and mutual aid agreements list available resources, including per-sonals, teams, facilities, equipments, and supplies. Modeling resources is to establish common terminology to categorize them and describe capabilities of them within and across multiple jurisdictions and disciplines. Standard and uniform methods of de-scribing resources provide the foundation of identifying, acquiring, allocating, and tracking them. Based on the model, emergency manager can order and allocate avail-able resources to support response operations effectively.The descriptions of resources in NIMS include category, kind, components, met-rics, and type, which define standardized mechanisms for describing resources re-quired over the life cycle of incidents [9]. Base on this theory and characteristics of resources listed in emergency plans, we define descriptions of resources with Re-sources , including name, category, kind, components, metric, types, capabilities, input parameters, output parameters, address, and phone numbers.,,,,,,,,i Resources ={resources =(name category,kind components metric types capabilities inputParas outputParas address,phoneNumeber)},i =1n L(7) The typing of Resources is specified by category and kind . Components describe units consisting of it. Metric is the measurement standard. Types refer to the level of resource capability. Capabilities refer to tasks it can execute alone. InputParas refers to parameters which are needed to perform relevant capabilities. OutpuParas is ob-jects created by relevant capabilities. All of them will be used to avoid confusion and enhance interoperability during the emergency resource management process. 3 Decision Making Based on Emergency Plan TemplatesEmergency response involves responsibilities of multiple jurisdictions and disciplines, and requires massive services and resources from them. Due to high consequence and time pressure, responders need to make decisions quickly on inadequate information to address these complex, ill structured problems. Emergency plans templates provide basis to analyze situations systematically, reason, implement and evaluate solutions during the process of decision making.When incidents happen, responders at strategic, operational and tactical levels make interrelated and complementary decisions rationally and logically to ensure working coordinately. Generally, they make decisions based on the common proce-dure, including: (a) understanding the situation, (b) establishing and prioritizing inci-dent objectives, (c) developing tactic plans to achieve adopted strategies, (d) estab-lishing organization to implement these plans, (e) evaluating and revising plans to overcome contingencies and improve effectiveness. Each phase should be followed in sequence to ensure coordinated operations to achieve those incident objectives. It is a typical team decision problem, which involve a team G that has decided to perform a set of actions A. During the process of decision making, effective coordination is an essential ingredient. However, two sources of difficulties, including poorly shared mental models and possible conflicts of distributed decision-making [12], prohibit coordination and reduce effectiveness.Decision Making Based on Emergency Plan Templates11873.1 Understanding SituationsWhen incident happen, personals should identify the organization and environment information, construct and maintain flexible and changing operational representations as incidents unfolds and evolves [13]. Acquiring critical information about situations accurately by observing the environment and communicating is the precondition of effective decision making. All operational representations are limited and hierarchical in term of scope and detail, which are different levels of abstraction of information about situations and are consistent with the lines of authority and responsibility.Incidents delineate parameters of decision making problems. Based on pertinent in-formation and evaluations, responders bind constants to these parameters, instantiate these models and formulate the specific decision making problem finally.3.2 Structuring OrganizationsEstablishing emergency organization is an effective method to control large scale disaster. The number of responders and the organizational structure are totally de-pendent on the size of incidents and specifics of hazardous environment created by them. After incidents happen, first responders are loose, chaotic, and confusions about their roles and responsibilities, which can result disastrous outcomes. Subsequently, based on the identified incident objectives, they settle into the formal organization model defined in section 2.2 under severe time constraints according to procedures defined by emergency plans. While emergency situations change unpredictably and drastically, the organization should expand and contract flexibly.EO provides a modular organization model to plot the control lines and establish organization for incidents from small routine events to large disasters. Structuring organizations is to formulate the organization and alter its structure to ensure effective response capability on scene. It consists of at least four basic processes to support the flexibility, including structure elaborating, role switching, authority migrating, and1188 P. Tang, H. Wang, and W. Zengsystem resetting [13], which are compliment and interrelated during emergencies. We abstract two mechanisms to support these processes.(1)Establishing the organization structure. During multiple operational periods, or-ganization structures are different. When incidents changes greatly, responders recon-figured the organization to get better performance. The process is to evaluate whether conditions of activating roles defined in Roles are activated according to real-time emergency situations.(2)Roles assignment. The assignment of roles is the process of staffing positions of EO. Responders assigned to the roles require specific expertise and training. Avail-able resources defined in Resoures have a continuum level of skills, which is range from rudimentary to highly specific according to types. Further more, boundaries of the organization structure fluctuate, and the task environment is volatile. Therefore, roles assignment is a sequence of decisions, which locate the best resources based on requirements of them.3.3 Collaborative PlanningStructuring organizations is the process of coordination in the level of organization structure. Organization processes in operational periods should be modeled as team-work to improve the coordination in the level of actions. This requires scenario-based planning and exercises with constant communications and coordination among re-sponders, which is support by collaborative planning.Collaborative planning is an ongoing, cyclical and directed process toward incident objectives. Generally, it consists of binding parameters of tasks, and selecting the optimal method to decompose complex tasks, which requires high level decisions. Based on determined objectives and priorities of them, staffs involving responsibili-ties of commanding should take on collaborative planning to develop action plans. During the process, incident management team select proper strategies, and decide which resources should be ordered and how to use them effectively. The result is an Incident Action Plan (IAP), which prioritizes incident objectives and provides tactical operations and resource assignments for unified efforts. Conducting activities based on it resolves interagency policy and procedural conflicts. As a distributed decision making process, it provides timely commitment and resource for critical emergency operations to ensure coordination among responders.When planned events happen, incident commanders select nodes defined in Tac-ticPlans to determine objectives, and binds parameters such as endTime and priority to refine them. Then, they evaluate situations, split it into sub nodes, and propagate constraints on parameters of them to parameters of those sub nodes. Then, they dele-gate these tasks to their subordinators. In the same way, they evaluate the task model, and continue the process of decomposition, until a set of simple tasks is got. Finally, they add and propagate constraints to these simple tasks.When finding a method of splitting the delegated task with lower cost or a problem prevents them from achieving it, they try to re-decompose it. At the end of the “means end analysis” process, a full and concise IAP consisting of simple tasks and con-straints among them will be finished and assigned to relevant responders.Decision Making Based on Emergency Plan Templates 1189 3.4 Executing and Supervising PlansAfter formulating the IAP, the process of decision making continues with the imple-mentation of formalized steps defined in it. A concise and full IAP is essential to execute emergency management activities during the initial process. Executing and supervising plans is the process of directing and controlling efforts of resources to achieve specified incident objectives. In the process, contingencies can cause disrup-tions, which may result in additional control problems, greater loss, and increased expense and risk. Therefore, emergency managers should regularly compare planned progress with actual progress. When deviations occur and new information emerges, they evaluate them and decide whether to modify the current plan and develop a new one for subsequent operational periods by executing this decision making model from the first step.4 Conclusion and Future WorkDecision making in emergency management is complex, distributed, and time critical problems, which requires geographically and temporally dispersed responders take on operations coordinately and rapidly. Emergency plan templates provide basis for the problem solving process. It is not only used for solving planed problems, but also as a starting point for solving novel problems during emergencies. This paper describes the initial PhD research work for developing decision making model and technology based on emergency plan templates.Our future work is on studying task decomposition and task allocation algorithms to support decision making in the emergency response process. 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