Using Agent-based Organisational Models for Crisis Management

Simulations of crisis scenarios have the potential to increase insight in the organisational structures needed as crises escalate. Multi-agent system (MAS) models allow for cost-effective simulations of changing organisational structures, enabling analysis of the implications for enactment during crisis escalation with respect to roles and communication structures. This paper presents an organisation-based model for crisis management that supports simulation of the dynamics of crisis management. Crisis management is a challenge, especially when crises escalate. The numbers of organisations involved increases, communication lines change, roles change. Simulations provide a means to study the consequences of escalation of crises with respect to structures involved. As a crisis escalates, organisational structures are systematically updated to reflect the changes in the nature of the crisis and the number of parties involved. In the real world, simulations are enacted using active personnel. However, such simulations are expensive, both in terms of the cost of execution and the cost of the time required for the emergency service personnel involved. Computer models of escalation of crisis, provides a more cost effective means to study the potential of different organisational structures in very many different scenarios. The research presented in this paper is part of the ALIVE project. ALIVE aims to apply organisational theory to the design and implementation of software systems. The main focus of the project is to create complex systems based on the composition of (existing) services, through the addition of levels of abstraction. The advantage of added levels of abstraction to the design process of systems is two-fold: 1) it is often more intuitive to think in organisational structures and interactions while designing complex interactions for services, and the addition of the layers of abstraction allows for a gradual (fluent) transition from the system as foreseen to the actual implementation; 2) when changes happen in the environment (for example, specific services become unavailable) the added levels of abstraction act as an explicit representation of the conceptual steps made at design, thus giving additional information on why certain interactions are as they are, that enables the system to dynamically cope with the changes.