Blockchain: A potential technology to improve the performance of collaborative emergency management with multi-agent participation

As the complexity of emergencies continues to increase, responding to them often exceeds the capabilities of any single public agency, multi-agent collaborative participation is an inevitable tendency in the development of emergency management. In the collaborative emergency response, it is important to support various responders with a unified platform to assist in decision-making, distribution of resources, and coordination of emergency operation. In recent years, blockchain has provided strong support for the innovation of emergency management mechanisms with its technical advantages such as distributed storage, decentralization, consensus algorithms, tamper-proof, traceability, and smart contract. This study firstly reviews the development of blockchain and its application in emergency management. Secondly, the connotation and key dilemmas of the multi-agent collaborative emergency management mechanism are expounded from two aspects of the multi-agent participation and the construction of a collaborative mechanism. Then, the possibility of using blockchain to facilitate the innovation of multi-agent collaborative emergency management mechanism is analyzed from the aspects of emergency management information sharing, resource storage and distribution, the rights and obligations of multiple subjects, supervision, reward and punishment. Finally, a conceptual model of a multi-agent collaborative emergency management mechanism based on alliance chain and public chain is proposed. The application of blockchain provides a new perspective and motivation for the innovation of emergency management system. This study provides a new method for improving the multi-agent collaborative emergency management mechanism, and is an important supplement and innovation to existing emergency management studies.