Developing a system for automated selection of immediate measures during major catastrophic events

Today every single operation of rescue forces such as fire brigades or emergency medical services is managed and coordinated by a scheduler. In case of an emergency or disaster the controller has to guarantee an effective and fast alerting of rescue forces to minimize the negative effects of such an event. In order to do so, he has to receive, monitor, combine and understand information from different sources at once. Especially in case of major disasters, the amount of incoming information, which has to be processed, is enormous. The derivation of the right and most effective decisions is time consuming. The time between the first incoming information of a happening disaster and the alerting of first rescue forces is called chaotic phase. The project PROMPT (Programmatic Selection of Immediate Measures for the Scheduling of Operations during Major Catastrophic Events) addresses the goal to minimize this phase by an integrated fuzzy-logic-inference-system. This system collects all incoming information from different sources and automatically generates and suggests prioritized measures. The suggested measures can be accepted or denied by the controller. In the project PROMPT, a system was developed in order to understand, interpret and combine fuzzy and discrete variables. The developed system constitutes the first step in the direction of semi-automated coordination of disaster-cases in times of regressive numbers of rescue forces and increasing numbers of natural hazards and disasters. During the development of the system, necessary technical and social requirements and challenges were identified and considered by the developers, end-users and experts. These identified aspects are representing important steps in the process of realizing such an automated and universally applicable system, which accumulates, understands and interprets information from different sources and generates prioritized measure suggestions for a controller. This contribution presents the process of developing such a system and highlights the necessary requirements regarding technical and social aspects.