Responsibility Modelling for Civil Emergency Planning

This paper presents a new approach to analysing and understanding civil emergency planning based on the notion of responsibility modelling combined with HAZOPS analysis of information requirements. Our goal is to represent complex contingency plans so that they can be more readily understood, so that inconsistencies can be highlighted and vulnerabilities discovered. In this paper, we outline the framework for contingency planning in the UK and introduce the notion of responsibility models as a means of representing the key features of contingency plans. Using a case study of a flooding emergency, we illustrate our approach to responsibility modelling and suggest how it adds value to current textual contingency plans. We briefly describe CASE tool support that we are developing for building and analysing responsibility models and discuss future directions for this research.