A Chatbot System to Support Mine Safety Procedures during Natural Disasters

Abstract

This study developed a chatbot to improve the efficiency of government activation of mine safety procedures during natural disasters. Taiwan has a comprehensive governmental system dedicated to responding to frequent natural disasters, and the Bureau of Mines has instituted clear procedures to ensure the delivery of disaster alarms and damage reports. However, the labor- and time-consumption procedures are inefficient. In this study, we propose a system framework for disaster-related information retrieval and immediate notifications to support the execution of mine safety procedures. The framework utilizes instant messaging (IM) applications as the user interface to look up information and send messages to announce the occurrence of disaster events. We evaluated the efficiency of the procedures before and after adopting the system and achieved a time-cost reduction of 55.8 min among three types of disaster events. The study has proven the feasibility of adopting novel techniques for decision-making and assures the improvement of the efficiency and effectiveness of the procedure activation.

WhatsApp-Based Cloud Service Chatbot Application for Emergencies or Disasters

“…Tsai et al [10] developed a chatbot to improve the efficiency of government activation of mining safety procedures during natural disasters. Taiwan has a comprehensive government system for responding to frequent natural disasters.…”

Bot-Based Emergency Software Applications for Natural Disaster Situations

“…We present and evaluate three bot-based applications that can help organizations help citizens who suffered from natural disasters. Bots have been previously used for medical purposes [11], for communication and training [12], and also for crisis communication and management [13]. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no previous work evaluating the performance of bot-based applications to show that those applications are able to cope with critical mission requirements.…”

“…These bots are typically implemented on Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram platforms. Bots are also used in the supply chain process [44] to analyze the user queries and provide information on the queried orders and supplies; they are also used in e-commerce and retail companies [45,46] where users can register, and then the bot shows catalogs, guides, shopping carts, reviews, tracks the purchases, and generates purchase orders; for medical assistance [11,47], virtual robots represented in a bot are used to communicate with patients and assist them in their routine needs; and they are also used for data collection [13,48,49]. In particular, the bot presented in [48] is designed to collect and validate real-time crowd-sourced flood users reports via social media (Messenger of Facebook bot or Twitter) to enhance the city's resilience to extreme weather events.…”

“…As we explained before, bots are typically used to collect data from different users. In the context of crisis and disaster management, the authors in [13] present a framework for a disaster-related information retrieval system and immediate notifications to support the execution of mine safety procedures. The system utilizes instant messaging (IM) applications as the user interface to look up information and send messages to announce the occurrence of disaster events.…”

Conversation-Based Information Delivery Method for Facility Management

“…Tsai et al used a fuzzy search algorithm to analyze users’ intents when they queried information through Ask Diana [ 44 ]. For instance, Tsai et al [ 45 ] developed a disaster management decision support system developed for the Bureau of Mine in the form of a chatbot. Cho and Lee [ 46 ] proposed a daily construction report data management system by using chatbot.…”