A Survey on Knowledge-Driven Multi-Agent Computer Simulations for Disaster Management

Protecting humans from disasters has been an active mission of governments and experts through the definition of disaster management plans. Defining disaster response strategies are crucial to reduce the number of victims and the economic impact. An efficient preparedness depends on the cycle which aims at planning and organizing disaster response, experimenting the plans through training and exercise, and Assessment of the planning based on the experiments. Therefore, plan assessment is an essential step in the preparedness to identify potential problems and planning errors. However, the plan assessment requires a plan experiment step. There are two ways to experiment plans: exercises and computer simulations. This survey focuses on preparedness phases for plan experimentation and effectiveness assessment by providing details about last work on mulit-agent simulation methods and knowledge engineering approaches. This survey answers the following question: how do multi-agent simulations and semantic representations of disaster management provide an effective way to assess disaster management plans? How to measure the quality of disaster management plans? Indeed, the plan’s effectiveness must be measured to support its improvement.