CRET: A Crisis Response Evaluation Tool to improve Crisis Preparedness

In recent years, crisis response has become cyberphysical in nature because of the increased use of computing technologies by the responders. As such, crisis preparedness requires objective evaluation of crisis response in addition to the traditional drills. This paper develops a generic Crisis Response Evaluation Tool (CRET) for off-line objective crisis response evaluation to improve preparedness. The evaluation is performed through model-based engineering, which allows specification and automated analysis of crisis response behavior. An established state-based stochastic model is used to describe the behavior of crisis response processes. The effectiveness of a planned action is measured in terms of the action’s qualifiedness (also called the Q-value)—which depends on the probability of any additional crises and the conformance to a temporal window-of-opportunity before which any action has to be performed. CRET uses Abstract Architecture Description Language (AADL) to specify the stochastic crisis response behavior model. Using this specification, CRET objectively analyzes the planned actions’ Q-values under different circumstances; thus enabling an objective evaluation for crisis preparedness.