Agent-Based Perception of an Environment in an Emergency Situation

Recent catastrophic disasters have brought urgent needs for diverse technologies for disaster relief. Currently, there is an overwhelming need for better information technology to help support the efficient and the effective management of the disaster management (also known as emergency response). In particular, actors and agencies need an assistance to help them to make a decision in a fashion time and to be able to coordinate their efforts in a flexible way in order to prevent further problems or effectively manage the aftermath of a disaster. Our project is situated in this context and consists to develop a generic Decision Support System (DSS), able to detect a risk in an uncertain and partially perceived environment and to prevent its evolution. The DSS kernel is a multiagent system with three layers, where each one has a specific role. The role of the lower layer, that we call the representation layer, is to represent the environment state and its evolution over the time. The environment is perceived as a whole of entities, directly or indirectly observable and of which states change permanently. These entities are modeled according to a taxonomic organisa-Laboratoire d'Informatique, de Traitement de l'Information et des Systèmes, University of Le Havre, 25 rue Philippe Lebon, 76058, Le Havre Cedex, France.