Designing emergency management services by ontology driven social simulation∗

There are numerous attempts to assess emergency plans by simulations, and excellent contributions have been proposed. Simulations have allowed emergency committees and emergency experts to improve the performance and efficiency of many emergency plans while decreasing the limitations of regular drills. However, there is no “most complete” tool, and most of the time, it is not possible to reuse and combine components of different frameworks. As a result, without a true interest in sharing and interconnecting works, researchers in this domain are constantly damned to reinvent the wheel. To improve this situation, this paper proposes a general model for designing emergency management services in indoor environments. The core of this model is EinSim, an ontology which gathers the most relevant concepts for the design of these services and which, in the spirit of the Liked Data methods, links a number of external and well-referenced data. The paper supports the hypothesis that semantic web technologies are a powerful tool to reuse, extend, and combine different simulation components. Moreover, the use of semantic reasoners allows providing developers with automatic verification in the emergency management service development.