Towards the Distributed Management of Emergencies: Forest Fires Case Study

Every day there are environmental emergency situations which require complex reasoning and coordination procedures to solve them. Recently, the Prestige oil tanker sinking in Galicia or floods in the Mediterranean coast each autumn are situations not solved/managed for different reasons, such as not having contingence plans, lack of previous cases or the lack of coordination between the entities involved in it. The automation of the management procedures needed to cope with such situations will not only help incident commanders in the decision making process, but also increase the performance and reduce possible human and environmental impacts. This paper discusses the possibility of developing a large-scale open agent-based system that, in cooperation with planning techniques, could be used by incident commanders to take decisions in the management of emergencies situations. We propose a distributed emergency management framework intended to cope with dynamic environments in which incident situations arrive in an unpredictable random intervals requiring the construction and execution of an strategic plan to ameliorate the nonwishes consequences. Our case study focuses in forest fires management of the Barcelona fire service. However, the architecture proposed can be adapted and used within different type of emergencies.