COSMOA an ontology-centric multi-agent system for co-ordinating medical responses to large-scale disasters

Abstract

Planning for large-scale disasters is becoming increasingly important especially with terrorism on the rise. Preparations are particularly necessary in the planning and provision of emergency medical services. Whilst emergency service training exercises have improved the situation current emergency plans can be rigid and may not take into account the operational conditions at the time. Gathering information from distributed sources, integrating it and then making decisions are required in order to make plans more dynamic. Such complexity makes it impossible for any single human or even a team to fulfil the roles adequately. In this paper we discuss how multi-agent systems can be employed to help address this problem. We describe COSMOA an ontology-centric multi-agent system for supporting hospitals during the response to a large-scale disaster by producing a web-based emergency plan. A prototype of COSMOA has been implemented and we discuss some of the preliminary results.