From Design of Experiments to Combinatorics of Disasters: A Conceptual Framework for Disaster Exercises.

In this paper, we present a conceptual framework for disaster exercises covering the modelling, generation and post-analysis of conducted exercises. Our proposed conceptual framework makes use of a combinatorial approach for actual disaster exercise generation from the literature. In particular, the scenarios in a disaster exercise generated by our framework collectively provide certain combinatorial sequence coverage guarantees and are also minimizing the overall number of scenarios. These coverage guarantees make the created scenarios ideal for the assessment of relief strategies and allow for easy generation of more extensive and effective exercises and training programs. We explain all the individual stages of our proposed framework and how they are mapped to particular steps in the disaster exercise design process.