Fire-fighter: a decision support system for fire management

Abstract

Fire-fighter acts as an intelligent assistant for the on-scene commander of a fire emergency on a naval vessel. Given a ship's model with information of the configuration, contents, fire-fighting resources, and some fire-specific knowledge, Fire-fighter will develop a fire management plan to suppress the fire. Fire-fighter is based on script-based planning. Scripts are skeleton plans which are similar in concept to contingency plans for emergencies. The known situation data is used to instantiate the skeleton plan. Fire-fighter interleaves planning, execution, and monitoring to better react to a changing environment. To measure the success of its emergency actions, Fire-fighter will monitor the progress of the plan. When actions fail or appear to be failing replanning will commence. In a hazardous environment, care must be taken to safely replan. Fire-fighter uses domain-dependent knowledge to determine why goals are not being met. Once the cause of failure is known, one can determine where to alter the plan and the appropriate steps to take.<>