Application of Ontology in Emergency Plan Management of Metro Operation

Emergency plans play a key role in the emergency management of metro operation. Well-prepared emergency response supported by plans can greatly mitigate the significant impact of metro incidents. However, most emergency plans remain as plain-text documents, which make it difficult to conduct efficient administrative work such as plan generation, documentation and maintenance. Operational use of plans such as rapid knowledge retrieval and acquisition cannot be performed as well, affecting emergency training during the preparation process as well as plan review at the scene of the accident. Additionally, the knowledge codified in emergency plans is mostly depicted by texts, which are not vivid and intuitive enough to clearly convey the instructions of response procedures and relative information. In this paper, an ontology-based knowledge management method is proposed, and a unified and formalized plan repository is built to facilitate the efficient administrative and operational use of emergency plans. BIM technology is applied to provide realistic visualization of the plan knowledge for better understanding. A prototype of emergency plan training system, which integrates BIM and the ontology-based plan repository, has been developed to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the method. A case study illustrates the knowledge management process and shows how staff training can benefit from the system.