Automated Service Integration for Crisis Management

The integration and coordination of different emergency service personnel is crucial to Crisis Management. Crisis centers create plans of action to deal with the various situations that arise during an event. These plans require different personnel with different expertise to execute them within a given set of constraints. In this paper, we show that such plans can be represented as workflows, and that the discovery and integration of personnel can use a scheme we previously developed for the establishment of virtual enterprises. An important extension to our previous work is the introduction of Intelligent Personal Assistants, or iPAs. iPAs aid in the discovery of appropriate personnel and provide the coordination between them and the crisis centers. iPAs also assist their users during plan execution by interfacing with different information sources, such as sensor networks, and by helping to dynamically modify the current plan of action as necessary.