Discovering crisis models to help assess coordination plans

Vietnam J Comput Sci (2017) 4:97–110 DOI 10.1007/s40595-016-0078-9 REGULAR PAPER Discovering crisis models to help assess coordination plans A case study of tsunami response plan given by Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Nguyen-Tuan-Thanh Le1,2 Tuong-Vinh Ho4,5,7 · Chihab Hanachi3 · Serge Stinckwich4,5,6 · Received: 30 April 2016 / Accepted: 10 August 2016 / Published online: 26 August 2016 © The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Recently, we have witnessed an increasing number of crises, not only natural disasters but also man-made ones. Coordination among several stakeholders is the key factor to reduce the damage caused by a crisis. However, the plan for coordination can be expressed under various representations, including textual format—the most used one in reality but hard to analyze its efficiency. We consider in this paper a combination of process and organization aspects of a coordination plan. Process models (e.g Petri Net, Business Process Model and Notation) could be used to capture The work presented in this paper has been funded by the ANR Genepi project. B Nguyen-Tuan-Thanh Le the processes of activities and messages exchanged between the actors involved in a crisis, while organization models (e.g. Role graph, agent-centred multi-agent system, organization centred multi-agent system) are used to highlight the roles, their interactions and the organizational structures. We then describe a proposal that allows performing an automatic transformation from process models to organization models. Our proposal is illustrated with a coordination plan for tsunami response, given by People Committee of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam. Keywords Coordination representation · Business process modelling · Multi-agent system · Organization-centred multi-agent system · Role graph · Mapping process to multi-agent system · Crisis management Chihab Hanachi Serge Stinckwich 1 Introduction Tuong-Vinh Ho Crisis situations such as natural disasters with environmental consequences impose the coordination of numerous stakeholders: firemen, medical organizations, police, etc. In the context of crisis resolution, coordination plans could be examined under different representations. The mostly used representation in reality is the textual format that has several drawbacks [1]. Its ambiguity makes the coordination among stakeholders difficult. Moreover, it cannot support the direct and autonomous analysis or simulation. Another possible representation of coordination is a process model, e.g. a Business Process Model and Notation diagram (BPMN) as shown in [1]. This diagram, built by analyzing an official textual plan, can support process simulation and analysis [2] due to process complexity, end-to-end process time, resources costs, etc. 1 IRIT Laboratory, University Paul Sabatier Toulouse III, Toulouse, France 2 University of Science and Technology of Hanoi, Hanoi, Vietnam 3 IRIT Laboratory, University Toulouse Capitole I, Toulouse, France 4 IRD, UMI 209, UMMISCO, IRD France Nord, 93143 Bondy, France 5 Sorbonne Universités, Univ. Paris 06, UMI 209, UMMISCO, 75005 Paris, France 6 Université de Caen Basse-Normandie, Caen, France 7 Institute Francophone International, Vietnam National University, Hanoi, Vietnam 123 98 Recently, we have witnessed an increasing interest in research aiming at modelling and simulating complex systems (such as Crisis Management) using multi-agent paradigm, i.e the micro aspect. Multi-agent system (MAS) could be separated by agent-centred multi-agent system (ACMAS), i.e. focusing on the individual aspect, and organization centred multi-agent system (OCMAS), i.e. focusing on the social aspect [11]. In our opinion, MAS currently lacks the means to design and visualize the whole system behaviour, i.e the macro aspect. Regarding software engineering, before the implementation, we must perform the design phase to have an overview of studied system. Thus, we argue that multi-agent paradigm should follow this way. For that reason, the idea of combination between business process and multi-agent system has been raised to improve agent-based design [6] as well as to allow performing divers analysis based on the strong sides of both paradigms (e.g. control-flow complexity metric for process model [14], organizational structure for OCMAS [13], etc.). Process models could be considered as additional components of agent ones, since they can provide means to represent an aggregate view of an MAS behaviour. In addition, process models share several concepts with MAS. Therefore, we believe that the marriage of Process- and Agent models is suitable to design an efficient coordination in complex system [7], such as crisis management, by improving the quality of coordination plan. While stakeholders and their behaviours may be described by agents, the crisis resolution plan is amenable to a process representation. The work presented in this paper follows a life cycle shown in Fig. 1 to transform from process models (Petri Net, BPMN) to organization models (Role graph, ACMAS and OCMAS). More precisely, we use the Agent-Group-Role (AGR) model proposed by [11] as an OCMAS representation and BDIAgent as an ACMAS representation. Vietnam J Comput Sci (2017) 4:97–110 Fig. 2 A scenario-based life cycle for process design and validation from text Our contribution in this paper consists in the definition of a mapping framework for coordination models in crisis response. We provide the guidelines of transformation among five complementary views (Petri Net, BPMN, Role graph, BDI-agent and AGR). Even if our work examines a concrete case (i.e. the tsunami response plan of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam), our approach can be applied to any coordination plan. This paper is organized as follows. We first give two process representations (Petri Net and BPMN) detected from our tsunami response plan in Sect. 2. Section 3 will present the mappings from process models to organization models (Role graph, ACMAS and OCMAS). Then we provide related works about the process-agent transformation and organizational structure assessment in Sect. 4. Finally, we conclude our work with some perspectives. 2 Design of processes for crisis resolution We propose a method to design process models of crisis resolution that have the following characteristics (cf. Fig. 2): Fig. 1 Life cycle of mapping from process models (Petri Net, BPMN) to organization models (Role graph, ACMAS and OCMAS) 123 1. It is composed of four steps with possible iterations following the validation of stakeholders. 2. The identification of high-level objects take action in support of a meta-model of simple crises (cf. Fig. 2). 3. It is organized around scenarios that correspond to possible plan of crisis resolution. 4. It exploits a process mining technique called α -algorithm [5] to derive the process of crisis resolution (i.e. a Petri Net with special prope (...truncated)