Ontological Decision-Making for Disaster Response Operation Planning

摘要

Disaster response operation planners could benefit from a software tool to assist them in extracting individual mission information from various operation tasking orders, determining resources able to carry out the operation, construct a number of alternative operation plans, alert them to mission-critical changes to these plans, and allow them to quickly replan when problems occur. Within the context of aircraft operation planning for disaster relief, we use an ontological approach to solve these problems that includes modeling the air coordination plan (ACP) knowledge domain with OWL and SWRL, making inferences about the capabilities of real-world resources using an automated reasoner, retrieving relevant operation planning resources with SPARQL, then building multiple plans from the results of the queries. We also use SPARQL queries of the operation planning ontology database to provide alerts to operation planners of potential mission-critical changes to resources. Our results show that this approach allows operation planners to generate and monitor aircraft operation plans having dependencies on aircraft and pilot availability, weather effects on payload effectiveness, flight route distance, and fuel availability. We conclude that an ontological approach to aircraft operation planning does work and also supports broader goals of data transparency, information sharing, and domain knowledge persistence.