Domain-Specific Software Language for Crisis Management Systems

Across the world, various crisis situations occur causing chaos and confusion as to how to deal with them. Hence, finding ways to transmit the necessary information regarding how to handle such incidents to various parties involved in such events is fundamental. As such, the field of crisis management focuses on determining the actions to undertake to quickly respond to the occurrence of a disaster. Ultimately, crisis management systems strive to guide individuals to better prepare themselves for any future encounter of crisis situations. In this paper, we investigate emergency circumstances, mainly natural disasters, to detail the requirements for workflow notations managing them. Taking into account these requirements, we propose a domain-specific software language (DSL) for crisis management based on the Use Case Map (UCM) metamodel. While workflow notations do exist that can model the basic procedures to undergo when a crisis incident occurs, none focuses specifically on crisis management systems or considers the 3D environment in which emergency situations unfold. The proposed DSL provides built-in support for modeling location-based, social media-inspired interactions in the 3D environment of a disaster, allowing crisis experts to author emergency procedures which are subsequently followed by crisis respondents and victims. The long-term goal is to reduce the damages or losses, in terms of property and life, caused by a crisis, benefiting us all as well as the environment we live in.