ESARS: A Situation-Aware Multi-Agent System for Real-Time Emergency Response Management

Abstract

This paper describes ESARS, a real-time situation-aware social media- enabled emergency situation alert and reporting system, as a decision support system built on multi-agent software design architecture for emergency situation management. The impact of an incident or disruption due to the incident could be minimized by implementing real-time intervention strategies that involve event monitoring, detection and situation identification via classification and prediction, notification, visualization and reporting that culminate in providing emergency support within time. The nature of agent behavior, which is autonomous, proactive and cooperative, makes them a suitable method for the design and deployment of a dynamic system of this nature. The system relies on historical and streamed real-time geolocation-enabled Twitter data stream for the target emergency events to provide decision-makers with dynamic, comprehensive, and timely information specific to the emergency situation.