Representation of Facility Contents and Threats for Supporting Identification of Vulnerabilities in Building Emergencies

Three case studies carried out on two types of building emergencies, flood and power outage, indicated that first responders need improved support to quickly identify which areas to protect in a facility during emergencies. Observations from these cases indicated that only information about vulnerable contents in a building and their locations was available, while actors also needed information on contents' vulnerability to different threats, since it is common that one threat will lead to another one (e.g., flood followed by power outage). Such information is needed since different types of contents and building systems are affected. Moreover, contents affected by a current threat (e.g., flood) might generate a new threat (e.g., power outage). Hence, there is a need for a vulnerability representation that can support such scenarios, minimizing information overload and time spent in gathering information from different sources. This paper presents the development of a representation schema that captures to what threats specific contents are vulnerable, as well as impact of a content malfunctioning during an emergency and location of contents in a facility. In order to develop this representation, we evaluated various subject-based classification techniques and implemented a faceted classification based representation, using data collected in the case studies. Results show that a faceted classification enables the representation of contents and their respective vulnerabilities as well as reduction of the search space from 8.88 to 99.41% (mean = 90.81%), depending on the number of facets selected for a given query.