ER-Agent Communication Languages and Protocol for Large-Scale Emergency Responses

In this paper, we introduce a new agent communication language (ER-ACL) and a corresponding protocol (ER-ACP) to be used in multi-agent systems (MAS) to assist large-scale emergency responses as a part of an Emergency Response Communication Framework. In the previous study of ACL, we found them lack the necessary richness to support communication during a large-scale disaster, inc. structure, semantics and user models. This inspired us to create a new ER-ACL to fulfil this gap. Four types of agents are supported in ER-ACL: victims, carers (medical & social workers), families & friends, and ER-rescuers & helpers (members of the public, NGOs, government agencies, etc.). The advantages of ER-ACL and ER-ACP are that they provide a well-defined foundation to connect victims with potential helpers, thereby enabling crowdsourcing via effective communication based on precise semantics. The ER-ACL represents a significant extension and specialisation of the FIPA ACL for applications in emergency response scenarios now that great technical ad-vances have been made in telecommunication (including image and video re-porting). We have also added many new message constructs from the Com-mon Alerting Protocol. In today’s uncertain world, we believe a well-managed and personalised communication system is vital to organise unstruc-tured/opportunistic resources to save lives. Not having found one in existence to-date, we hope our efforts can help close this gap.