HAZUS-Based Drill Scripts Generation Using Unity and Ontology with Semantic Rules

As there is an increasing number of disasters hitting countries around the world, numerous mitigation strategies have been proposed and implemented to alleviate such impacts. Indeed, every year many public and private organizations work together to prepare various disaster exercises for training their first responders. Design of an appropriate drill script, hence, plays an important role of enhancing the capability of first responders or emergency response units in response to a real disaster. However, developing a reasonable disaster scenario is a time-consuming and error-prone task, not to mention the prerequisites pertaining to extensive experience and knowledge in disasters handling that drill script designers must have. Therefore, in this research an ontology model with SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) constructs was proposed to help the drill scripts generation process. Drill script designers can use the Taiwan Earthquake Loss Estimation System (TELES), which is a customized and simplified version of the HAZUS-MH program from FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), to create data sets describing the impact of a simulated earthquake in a certain region. Then, the proposed model and tools, called EDSS (Earthquake Drill Scripts generation and rendering System), can incorporate the input data sets and generate a set of corresponding drill scripts, which follow the pre-defined rules represented in the ontology model. Each drill script will contain a unique and possible scenario describing the earthquake damage on different buildings or facilities in the region. Unity, a serious game platform, was utilized in the proposed system for displaying all the events associated with the earthquake in accordance with the drill script designed. Finally, disaster mitigation experts were asked to evaluate the drill scripts generated and to assess the effectiveness of the proposed model. The assessment results showed that the proposed model and tools can help first responders possess better situation awareness regarding how an earthquake will progress. Mitigation of earthquake damage can be achieved if first responders can use the proposed system to review the scene before commencing any search and rescue work.