Case-Based Reasoning for Disaster Management: Structure Design for Cascading Disasters Case Base

With the acceleration of urbanization and changes in the human living environment, disaster mode has become more and more complex, for example, successive or concurrent disasters. In particular, the chain effect of disaster increases the difficulty of emergency response. It requests a new requirement on case base structure design to adapt cascading disasters. By summarizing and improving our previous study, a relatively complete case base structure for cascading disasters is proposed. In this chapter, we call it “cascading disasters case pedigree (CDCP)" as a novel concept for improving current emergency case base. CDCP consists of longitudinal and horizontal dimension based on biological classification and evolution. Specifically, longitudinal dimension classifies disaster scenarios considering urban environment, hazard, and hazard-affected object and severity. Horizontal dimension describes disaster context evolution from the chain perspective. The relationship between the two dimensions is also discussed. We find that CDCP can fit the special structure of cascading disasters case and reorganize all the source cases in a holistic framework. With the support of CDCP, emergency decision-makers can design specific cascading disasters case base for their cities. It is convenient to store and manage cascading disasters cases and can improve case-based reasoning (CBR) to a great extent.