A Framework for Dynamic Composition and Management of Emergency Response Processes

TY - JOUR

T1 - A Framework for Dynamic Composition and Management of Emergency Response Processes

AU - Elahraf, Abeer

AU - Afzal, Ayesha

AU - Akhtar, Ahmed

AU - Shafiq, Basit

AU - Vaidya, Jaideep

AU - Shamail, Shafay

AU - Adam, Nabil R.

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2022 IEEE.

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

N2 - An emergency response process outlines the workflow of different activities that need to be performed in response to an emergency. Effective emergency response requires communication and coordination with the operational systems belonging to different collaborating organizations. Therefore, it is necessary to establish information sharing and system-level interoperability among the diverse operational systems. Unlike typical e-government processes that are well structured and have a well-defined outcome, emergency response processes are knowledge-centric and their workflow structure and execution may evolve as the incident unfolds. It is impractical to define static plans and response process workflows for every possible situation. Instead, a dynamic response should be adaptable to the changing situation. We present an integrated approach that facilitates the dynamic composition of an executable response process. The proposed approach employs ontology-based reasoning to determine the default actions and resource requirements for the given incident and to identify relevant response organizations based on their jurisdictional and mutual aid agreement rules. The Web service APIs of the identified response organizations are then used to generate an executable response process that evolves dynamically. The proposed approach is implemented and experimentally validated using an example scenario derived from the FEMA Hazardous Materials Tabletop Exercises Manual.

AB - An emergency response process outlines the workflow of different activities that need to be performed in response to an emergency. Effective emergency response requires communication and coordination with the operational systems belonging to different collaborating organizations. Therefore, it is necessary to establish information sharing and system-level interoperability among the diverse operational systems. Unlike typical e-government processes that are well structured and have a well-defined outcome, emergency response processes are knowledge-centric and their workflow structure and execution may evolve as the incident unfolds. It is impractical to define static plans and response process workflows for every possible situation. Instead, a dynamic response should be adaptable to the changing situation. We present an integrated approach that facilitates the dynamic composition of an executable response process. The proposed approach employs ontology-based reasoning to determine the default actions and resource requirements for the given incident and to identify relevant response organizations based on their jurisdictional and mutual aid agreement rules. The Web service APIs of the identified response organizations are then used to generate an executable response process that evolves dynamically. The proposed approach is implemented and experimentally validated using an example scenario derived from the FEMA Hazardous Materials Tabletop Exercises Manual.

KW - Business process composition

KW - emergency response processes

KW - knowledge-centric business processes

KW - process evolution

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85108165212

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85108165212#tab=citedBy

U2 - 10.1109/TSC.2020.3030211

DO - 10.1109/TSC.2020.3030211

M3 - Article

SN - 1939-1374

VL - 15

SP - 2018

EP - 2031

JO - IEEE Transactions on Services Computing

JF - IEEE Transactions on Services Computing

IS - 4

ER -