Proposing a Unified Knowledge and Experience-based System using Information Fusion Approach to Facilitate the Disaster Management Process

The present paper has suggested the idea of a knowledge-based approach to facilitate disaster management process. Actually, it seems that when a society faces a critical situation, an information system which is built up through collecting and classifying existing knowledge from the various related resources (in an off-line phase) can be very helpful. In case of a disaster (as the online mode of the system), it searches its knowledge base to find the most similar instances to the current situation, and based on the available solution for the original case in the knowledge base, suggests some solutions and preventative warnings to the corresponding human roles, who are involved in the aid provision. As there should be various input sensors available (vision, earthquake intensity detector and even human observers who act as very accurate sensors), one of the main aspects in this system is applying information fusion approaches in all three levels(i. e. data, feature and decision) to recognize the critic situation more precisely. The main purpose of fusion in this paper is the synergic combination of retrieved information from different sensors and mixing these partial perceptions from each modality, so that we can find a certain description of the situation. When the architecture is described in detail, a brief discussion on the structural and functional evaluation of the proposed architecture is presented.