A Knowledge Management Perspective on Emergency Plan Management

Emergency plan management concerns organizations and communities worldwide that need to respond to emergency situations efficiently. Several models have already been proposed to represent knowledge in the emergency domain, but in practice planners still base emergency plans on their own technical background and experience and taking into account the legal requirements of the country concerned. Current frameworks for plan development do not integrate emergency knowledge and the emergency planning process in order to generate better emergency plans. In this context, we developed the QuEP framework for the assessment and improvement of emergency plans and their management in organizations. Following the QuEP maturity levels, the ability of planners to build better plans is continuously improved, as is the performance of the activities involved in the emergency plan management. In this paper, we propose a knowledge model for emergency plan management based on the QuEP framework. The inclusion of a knowledge model in QuEP that combines contextual and non-contextual knowledge in an emergency allows organizations to improve their emergency plan management. On one hand, we obtain a (semi)automatic assessment of emergency plan management using the knowledge included in the emergency plan. On the other hand, our proposal provides more knowledge to the decision-making process during an emergency. A more detailed study on different activities related to the lifecycle of emergency plan management can be carried out to provide more information on the actions to be performed by the different stakeholders involved (organization, planners, workers, responders, and citizen). Finally, including knowledge management also has other benefits, such as improving context-sensitiveness, information dissemination and contextual information in decision-making, as well as increasing stakeholders' awareness, updating and maintaining current emergency plans, and improving audit processes. Knowledge management therefore adds value to the creation of emergency plans and their management and improves an organization's emergency management maturity level.