The International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences. Vol. XXXVII. Part B4. Beijing 2008 
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Figure 1. Illustration of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) 
3. DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR DISASTER 
MANAGEMENT 
Disaster management is a very complex process. It contains not 
only sensing, monitoring and detection of pre-disaster, but also 
response, rescue and recovery of post-disaster. That is to say, 
disaster management covers all four stages including 
preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery (Chen et al., 
2006; Fiedrich and Burghardt, 2007). 
As stated above, disaster management involves a variety of 
disaster response entities, such as ambulance team, fire brigade, 
doctors and police office, etc. On the one hand, each entity has 
its own duty and responsibility. On the other hand, all the 
entities involved must cooperate and collaborate closely. It 
means that their interactions must be considered carefully. 
Multi-agent system and rule-based expert system play critical 
roles in the implementation of decision support for disaster 
management. More details will be discussed in the following 
section. 
3.1 Multi-Agent System (MAS) 
Multi-agent system provides a mechanism and platform to 
support the cooperation and collaboration among agents. Within 
a multi-agent system, the task is split into individual subtask. 
Each agent will take charge of one specific subtask. Finally, the 
task can be achieved through the cooperation and collaboration 
among agents. Thus the very nature of multi-agent system does 
fit the requirements of disaster management. In the context of 
disaster management, each disaster response entity can be 
regarded as an agent, and then each agent can be assigned to a 
subtask. Therefore, the process of disaster decision making can 
be transformed into the cooperation and collaboration of 
corresponding agents. The representation of disaster response 
entities through multi-agent system is shown in Figure . 
Figure 2. Representation of Relevant Entities using MAS 
3.2 Rule-Based Expert System 
Rule-based expert system provides a nature way to capture and 
represent the expertise and professional knowledge related with 
disaster management and emergency response. Within a rule- 
based expert system, domain knowledge will be represented as 
a set of rules. A rule presents specific description of how to 
solve a given problem. Each rule includes the IF...THEN 
structure, i.e., IF <condition> THEN <action>. When the 
condition of IF part comes into true, the rule is said to fire and 
then the action of THEN part will be executed. The basic 
workflow of a rule-based expert system is shown in Figure 3. 
Figure 3. Basic Workflow of Rule-Based Expert System 
When using rule-based expert system, a fundamental question is: 
where does the domain knowledge come from and how to 
capture them into knowledge base? 
For disaster management and emergency response, the source 
of relevant knowledge includes human expertise and 
documented data and information. The knowledge obtained 
from human experts and documented data and information can 
be captured into knowledge base through knowledge 
engineering. Figure 3 shows the process of creation of disaster 
management knowledge base.