Abstract

Crisis and disasters have always been with us. Time and again they have caught us unprepared to deal with the rapid and unexpected changes that they are inducing to the environment. The increasing number of crises and disasters has motivated more and more academics, consultants, and practitioners to engage in crisis-related activities. The project on crisis management researched at the Man Machine Interaction group at TUDelft University is such an activity, focused on developing tools that can help people better coordinate their efforts towards resolving a crisis.
The icon based observation tool for crisis situations has been designed as an alternative means of communication. The graphical interface and the use of intuitive icons should prove very useful when trying to report about a crisis.
The Cougaar framework was used to wrap the application, giving it the shape of a distributed agent-based application. Cougaar is an open-source, Java-based architecture for the construction of highly scalable distributed agent-based applications. The Cougaar architecture distinguishes itself from other architectures by its agent model, based on a distributed blackboard.
This paper presents the design and implementation of the icon based observation tool, insisting on the Cougaar elements used to model it as a distributed agent-based application.