الفهرس 
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Abstract
In this chapter, some concluding remarks and suggestions for future work are presented. Section 8.1 presents summary of the work done in this thesis. Section 8.2 presents the main conclusions. Section 8.3 lists suggestions and future work.
8.1. Summary
Crises are continuing thread to the human being, capable of causing significant losses to the society, the economy, and the lives of individuals and communities. Number of losses of a crisis are affected by many factors; the surge of the crisis event, level of preparedness, and the crisis response. The nature of a crisis ranges from natural crises like hurricanes and earthquakes to man-made crises like plane crashes, terrorist attacks, willful acts of mass destruction, industrial accidents, etc. The challenge of crisis response is reducing the influence crises cause to society, the economy, and the lives of individuals and communities.
Major crises in the last couple of years show that there exist huge problems in the current practice of crisis response and management. It is a combination of failure in communication, failure in technology, failure in methodology, failure of management and finally failure of observation. It is therefore important that solutions are provided to prevent these kinds of failure in the future. There are a lot of rooms for improvement in making the right command decisions based on the available information, increasing the effectiveness of overall response operations, training of response teamwork, studying decisions alternatives and consequences prior to its occurrence.
Crisis response needs information and communication-intensive efforts that impose demanding requirements on underlying information technologies. The crisis response domain is characterized as a virtual environment of required distributed control, huge amount of data, uncertainty, ambiguity, multiple stakeholders with different objectives, and limited resources which continually vary. In consequence of mentioned domain characteristics; crisis response systems require a multi-disciplinary system design approach. Crisis response systems design should include: (i) filtering and data fusion methods, (ii) decision-making and machine learning methods for determining actions in response to states, (iii) interaction mechanism to manage the interaction between multiple actors and to model collective behavior, and (iv) system architecture studies of different system organizations and information exchange topologies.
This thesis proposed building a multi-agent model for crisis response. The main goals behind building this model are to build human-like participation in crisis response with learning and decision making capabilities, and improve response operations effectiveness and utilization of resources. In this context, the thesis provides a general overview of crisis response and management domain (chapter 2), and related models and theories to the domain of crisis response such as: the role of AI in crisis response, multi-agent aspects for crisis response, situation management, decision making and planning, and AIS as a metaphor for building the multi-agent model (Chapter 3). The design requirements of crisis response systems are defined by surveying domain specialists comments and examining current crisis response systems (Chapter 4). These design requirements are very important to guideline the design of the proposed response model. Then the proposed conceptual response model is presented based on the AIS metaphor. The proposed model inherits the system architecture and the operational architecture of the AIS systems (Chapter 5). To validate the proposed response model a pandemic influenza model in Egypt is proposed. The pandemic influenza model is presented as another multi-agent model specialized for the pandemic spread simulation (Chapter 6). Design, implementation, and simulation experiments of the proposed response model are provided in details including database tables, control flow, user interface screens, and snapshots of execution rounds (Chapter 7).
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