Coordination in Disaster Management and Response: A Unified Approach

Natural, technological and man-made disasters are typically followed by chaos that results from an inadequate overall response. Three separate levels of coordination are addressed in the mitigation and preparedness phase of disaster management where environmental conditions are slowly changing: (1) communication and transportation infrastructure, (2) monitoring and assessment tools, (3) collaborative tools and services for information sharing. However, the nature of emergencies is to be unpredictable. Toward that end, a fourth level of coordination --- distributed resource/role allocation algorithms of first responders, mobile workers, aid supplies and victims --- addresses the dynamic environmental conditions of the response phase during an emergency. A tiered peer-to-peer system architecture could combine those different levels of coordination to address the changing needs of disaster management. We describe in this paper the architecture of such a tiered peer-to-peer agent-based coordination decision support system for disaster management and response and the applicable coordination algorithms including ATF, a novel, self-organized algorithm for adaptive team formation.