A compendious review of agent-based disaster management

Ongoing research has shown the effectiveness of agent technology in modelling and simulating disaster management systems and dealing with related activities such as risk assessment, victim search and rescue, evacuation operations and many other disaster management processes. In this paper we provide a comprehensive review of agent-based disaster management research in view of understanding the benefits and potential opportunities of applying agent modelling and simulation to support managers at different disaster phases. The review has revealed that the potential contribution of agent technology to disaster management lies in its inherent capacity to cope with issues such as human behaviour simulation, dynamic and distributed decision making under uncertainties, cooperative planning and optimisation, learning and prediction as well as other associated problems. The review helps readers to identify current challenges related to agent-based disaster management that are considered worthy for future research and publication.