Decision Making in Disaster Management: From Crisis Modeling to Effective Support

Crisis management is a challenging domain to model because of its multiple stakeholders, its complex resource management, its rich communication and control mechanisms, etc. It consists in sets of interdependent activities occurring in an evolving environment under stressful conditions and high pressures. It becomes difficult to support given that any decision includes multiple actors, multiple emergency services, etc. [1]. Therefore, we believe that a systemic modeling of such complex socio-technical system (including the decisions makers, stakeholders, coordination processes, etc.) would improve the potential to support effectively the crisis management. We focus in this paper on the effective use of modeling to manage crisis. In this paper, we present firstly most relevant existing metamodels of crisis management. Secondly, we describe the criteria we defined to classify these metamodels. Thirdly, we present the results of this classification and finally, we conclude by suggesting first requirements needed for an effective metamodel useful to support decision processes in crisis management.