Situation assessment in disaster management

We present a framework for decision-making in relation to disaster management with a focus on situation assessment during disaster management monitoring. The use of causality reasoning based on the temporal evolution of a scenario provides a natural way to chain meaningful events and possible states of the system. There are usually different ways to analyse a problem and different strategies to follow as a solution and it is also often the case that information originating in different sources can be inconsistent or unreliable. Therefore we allow the specification of possibly conflicting situations as they are typical elements in disaster management. A decision procedure to decide on those conflicting situations is presented which not only provides a framework for the assistance of one decision-maker but also how to handle opinions from a hierarchy of decision-makers.