Towards the development of a standard protocol for information sharing during emergency management with critical infrastructures involved

Civil Protection, Crisis Management, and Emergency Preparedness have been known as ever-growing topics of academic research during the recent decades. Due to real-time purposes, there has been a wide range of efforts all over the world in order to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of relevant plans and operations. In particular, planning for emergency situations ahead of threatening events is crucial for moving towards resilient societies. In this context, the importance of Critical Infrastructures (CI) is undeniable. Although high complexities and interdependencies of the system of CIs provide in a better way the various needs of communities, at the same time, make the analysis of such system more difficult, which would be a primary problem to handle for the sake of CI resilience and efficient interaction with other systems. Lack of timely and actionable Information Sharing (IS) among organizations and agencies involved in emergency management, particularly during the Response Phase, can cause serious problems due to chain of failures. It is of great importance to include Critical Infrastructure Operators in the framework of information exchange, knowing the vital role of CI Operation and Service Continuity on the overall economy, security, public health, and safety of societies. First, investigation of barriers of information sharing during emergencies will pave the way towards providing solutions to overcome such problems. Namely, situational awareness, team awareness, interoperability, differences among organizations, and role ambiguity are issues which should be taken into account for IS improvement. Development of a Standard Protocol for information sharing during real emergencies, which takes into account CI operators and First Responders (FR), can be a huge step for effective Risk Management. The necessity of development and use of such protocol has been mentioned by researchers and practitioners. A critical review is done on past or ongoing works related to emergency information sharing, in order to extract their ideas as well as avoid parallel efforts. Scientific Papers, Institutional Reports, and European Commission Joint Projects are major sources for this purpose, among which some have developed Ontology-based information sharing standards in the operational level, which are the most relevant to this research. Characteristics and coverage of such standards are considered on one hand, and general features of a required conceptual framework are considered on the other hand; then, a systematic approach has been utilized to introduce a model (ontology) for information sharing in the operational level by cross-referencing of existing features. Finally, the developed protocol is applied to a case study to show in a better way the contribution it can make to the state of the art in the field. The case study suggests that the proposed conceptual model can be adopted, and selected features of existing standards can be useful in a real scenario. Future works may include further development of this ontology based on observed gaps and missing elements, in order to introduce a comprehensive standard or protocol for information sharing during emergencies taking into consideration the important role of heterogeneous system of critical infrastructures.