Framework of an Emergency Management System Using Different Rescue Simulators

An emergency management system (EMS) is extremely important at the time of disasters as it provides the necessary support to rescue commanders. In recent times, people’s requirements with regard to an EMS and the technologies that support an EMS have changed, and different systems have been developed for different purposes. For example, there are systems that simulate urban-size disasters and evacuation behaviors. Other systems have been designed to assist the development of rescue robots whose function is to search and rescue victims. This paper presents a framework that links simulations that have been developed independently, and a prototype system that connects two disaster and rescue systems with different features. The prototype system shows a possibility that the framework makes the simulations versatile ones as a part of an EMS. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden and The Robotics Society of Japan, 2009