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Adriaan ter Mors, Jeroen M. Valk, & Cees Witteveen. (2005). An event-based task framework for disaster planning and decision support. In B. C. B. Van de Walle (Ed.), Proceedings of ISCRAM 2005 – 2nd International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 151–153). Brussels: Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium.
Abstract: Because of the apparent ineffectiveness of current disaster plans, we focus our research on modeling emergency response activities. If we can capture the crucial concepts of emergency response in a mathematical framework and apply this framework to construct disaster plans, then we pave the way for the development of automated decisions support systems for emergency response.
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Adriaan Ter Mors, Xiaoyu Mao, Nicola Roos, Cees Witteveen, & Alfons H. Salden. (2007). Multi-agent system support for scheduling aircraft de-icing. In K. Nieuwenhuis P. B. B. Van de Walle (Ed.), Intelligent Human Computer Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM 2007 Academic Proceedings Papers (pp. 467–478). Delft: Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM.
Abstract: Results from disaster research suggest that methods for coordination between individual emergency responders and organizations should recognize the independence and autonomy of these actors. These actor features are key factors in effective adaptation and improvisation of response to emergency situations which are inherently uncertain. Autonomy and adaptability are also well-known aspects of a multi-agent system (MAS). In this paper we present two MAS strategies that can effectively handle aircraft deicing incidents. These MAS strategies help improve to prevent and reduce e.g. airplane delays at deicing stations due to changing weather conditions or incidents at the station, where aircraft agents adopting pre-made plans that would act on behalf of aircraft pilots or companies, would only create havoc. Herein each agent using its own decision mechanism deliberates about the uncertainty in the problem domain and the preferences (or priorities) of the agents. Furthermore, taking both these issues into account each proposed MAS strategy outperforms a naive first-come, first-served coordination strategy. The simulation results help pilots and companies taking decisions with respect to the scheduling of the aircraft for deicing when unexpected incidents occur: they provide insights in the impacts and means for robust selection of incident-specific strategies on e.g. deicing station delays of (individual) aircraft.
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J. Renze Steenhuisen, Mathijs M. De Weerdt, & Cees Witteveen. (2007). Enabling agility through coordinating temporally constrained planning agents. In K. Nieuwenhuis P. B. B. Van de Walle (Ed.), Intelligent Human Computer Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM 2007 Academic Proceedings Papers (pp. 457–466). Delft: Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, ISCRAM.
Abstract: In crisis response, hierarchical organizations are being replaced by dynamic assemblies of autonomous agents that promise more agility. However, these autonomous agents might cause a decrease in effectiveness when individually constructed plans for moderately-coupled tasks are not jointly feasible. Existing coordination techniques can be applied in the pre-planning phase to guarantee feasible joint plans for partially-ordered tasks. Temporal relations in crisis response are often more complex than the simple precedence relations in current work. Therefore, we analyze whether temporal information can be dealt with by a conversion to partially-ordered tasks with only precedence constraints. Time windows and two temporal constraints (overlaps and during) can be rewritten in such a way that the task remains partially-ordered. When other temporal constraints (meets, starts, finishes, and equals) are used, tasks become tightly-coupled, requiring coordination in the execution phase as well. This work shows the applicability of pre-planning coordination as an enabling technology for the effective formation of agile organizations.
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