A system of systems approach to disaster management

Disaster situation management involves managing information and resources to tackle time varying situations surrounding a geo-spatial region of interest. Post disaster, relief and recovery operations are handled in a distributed self-configuring manner and involve a diverse array of resources and participants. Although in-situ planning is the only option, disaster situation management should consider system requirements, processes and interdependencies to make the process effective. Having a higher level view of the system, its requirements and the evolving situations warrant the need for accurate models; models that are able to predict, forecast and deal with the logistical, technical, operational, and financial challenges. We propose a system of systems approach to situation modeling to represent the causal relationships between resources, functional assets and different stages in the infrastructure renewal process. Generic interactions at the situation and system level have been defined and theory is developed for the use of fuzzy graphical models. A genetic algorithms based technique has been developed to determine optimal structure and parameters of the graphical model. Real world data from a post earthquake reconstruction process is used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.