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APPROACH TO POLICY HIERARCHIES FOR ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTERS MANAGEMENT 
Zhu Zesheng 3, Sun Ling ©, Guan Hengshen à 
*JiangSu Academy Of Agricultural Sciences, Nanjing, JiangSu, 210014, P. R. China 
"Nanjing Naval Institute of Electronic Engineering, Nanjing, JiangSu, 211800, P. R. China 
KEY WORDS: Environment, Agriculture, Method, Management, Information 
ABSTRACT 
Environmental disasters management, involves monitoring the activity of the disasters, making management 
decisions and performing control actions to reduce the influence of the disasters. Most of the research on the 
management has concentrated on management mechanisms related to disasters management. However, in order to 
automate the management of very many environmental disasters, it is necessary to be able to represent and 
manipulate policy within the management. These objectives are typically determined in the form of general policies 
which require detailed interpretation by the disaster managers. This paper discusses the refinement of general high 
level policies into a number of more specific policies to form a policy hierarchy. Each policy in the hierarchy 
represents, to its maker, his plans to meet his objectives and, to its subject, the objectives which he must plan to 
meet. Management action policies are introduced, and the distinction between imperative and authority policies to 
responsibility, and to authority policies, is discussed . The approach presented in the paper offers a key step forward 
to bridging the gap between environmental disasters and managers' demands for efficient disasters management. 
The proposed concept for policy hierarchy can also be used as a general framework to assist design, implementation 
and operation of management systems of various environmental disasters. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
The management of environmental disaster is very 
important for economical development of developing 
country. Especially, management systems of 
environmental disaster have increased dramatically in 
both size and complexity in the last few years. 
However, the new power brought with modern 
information processing technology creates greater 
vulnerability (Neumannm, 1992). Since fault are 
inevitable, quick detection, identification and recovery 
are crucial to make the systems more robust and their 
operation more reliable. 
As management systems of environmental disaster 
become more heterogeneous and more hardware and 
software from various vendors are used, the whole 
picture of the specification becomes bewildering. This 
brings out the need for a unified approach or principles 
to the area of survivability management of agricultural 
production system under environmental disaster. 
The task of the management System of environmental 
disaster is to keep track of environmental disaster 
status, which include both severity and extent, and 
trigger control actions when necessary. The 
management process can be divided into the 
monitoring process and control process. The 
monitoring process involves collecting information 
about the environmental disaster's short-term or long- 
term behavior and interpreting the semantics of the 
Intemational Archives of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. Vol. XXXII. Part 7, Budapest, 1998 
collected information. The control process affects the 
state of environmental disaster according to the 
interpreted information to achieve a desired outcome. 
Thus, there are two kinds of major issues in 
environmental disaster management as the followings. 
(1)Management information infrastructure: Any 
management system of environmental disaster must 
be constructed on top of the underlying management 
information model which the representation schemes 
and operations are based. Given that an 
environmental disaster occurs, several issues are 
confronted when designing the infrastructure of the 
management information of environmental disaster. 
They include the management information 
representation and information distribution strategy. 
(2)Automatic and adaptive management. The 
maintenance of a large number of objects related to 
environmental disasters in management information 
base (MIB) needs to be done automatically to keep 
the status information up-to-date. Management 
applications of environmental disaster distribution 
can then easily identify and update objects. This 
changes the distribution of disaster entities. Either 
remedial or preventive management schemes of 
disaster influence need to be triggered automatically 
by the influence alarms, which again depend on 
automatic interpretation of disaster measurement 
and influence. This measurement interpretation 
implies that the management system needs to keep 
track of the disaster patterns and perform adaptive 
control. 
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