Data Model of the Strategic Action Planning and Scheduling Problem in a Disaster Response Team

Abstract

Problem:Strategic action planning and scheduling (SAP) in the coordination of a disaster response team involves selecting and decomposing an objective into sub-goals, grouping available units into coalitions and assigning them to the sub-goals, allocating units to tasks, and adjusting the decisions that have been made. The primary responsibility of a team’s incident commander (IC) in SAP is to coordinate the actions of operational units in disaster crisis/emergency response management by making macro/strategic decisions.Objective:In this paper, we completely model a real-world problem and present data related to the SAP problem. This data model is used to support the design and development of an appropriate approach to SAP.Method:The employed methodology is to analyze and study the SAP problem, which is composed of six essential dimensions: the problem domain, geographic information, geospatial-temporal macro tasks, strategic action planning, strategic action scheduling, and team structure.Result:The contribution of this paper is the SAP problem data model. It is designed as a unified modeling language (UML) class diagram consisting of entity types, attributes, and relationships associated with SAP problem data modeling.Conclusion:To evaluate the quality of SAP data modeling, the SAP problem data model is used to propose and develop an intelligent assistant software system to assist and collaborate with incident commanders in SAP. The study makes five novel contributions: 1) a complete data model for SAP problem modeling, 2) a presentation and aggregation of task information in geographic objects, 3) the expression and encoding of human intuition as human high-level strategy guidance for SAP, 4) the formulation of a strategic action plan, and 5) the integration of strategic action schedule information with other entities.