From Textual Emergency Procedures to Executable Plans

Crisis response and management often involve joint actions among different actors. This is particularly true in cross border cooperation, i.e. when actors belong to different countries. This is the operative context of the NETTUNIT research project, which long-term objective is to provide automatic support to emergency management. The big issue is that emergency plans are usually written in free-form text, thus in a form that is very far from being automatically processed and executed. In other words, it is non-trivial to define workflows capable of managing and monitoring an emergency plans. To complicate the problem, typically an emergency evolves in a highly dynamic environment, so there is the need for run-time adaptation. In this paper, we propose a roadmap for producing executable workflows from emergency free-text plans. We set up our current progress in the project and focus on the sub-problem of identifying a suitable modelling notation. We also propose two improvements with respect to the state of the art: 1) a specific diagram focusing on events, roles and responsibilities in a goal-oriented fashion; 2) some guidelines for depicting the emergency plan at hand with a modelling notation.