Structured AI decision-making in disaster management

Journal article

With artificial intelligence (AI) being applied to bring autonomy to decision-making in safety-critical domains such as the ones typified in the aerospace and emergency-response services, there has been a call to address the ethical implications of structuring those decisions, so they remain reliable and justifiable when human lives are at stake. This paper contributes to addressing the challenge of decision-making by proposing a structured decision-making framework as a foundational step towards responsible AI. The proposed structured decision-making framework is implemented in autonomous decision-making, specifically within disaster management. By introducing concepts of Enabler agents, Levels and Scenarios, the proposed framework’s performance is evaluated against systems relying solely on judgement-based insights, as well as human operators who have disaster experience: victims, volunteers, and stakeholders. The results demonstrate that the structured decision-making framework achieves 60.94% greater stability in consistently accurate decisions across multiple Scenarios, compared to judgement-based systems. Moreover, the study shows that the proposed framework outperforms human operators with a 38.93% higher accuracy across various Scenarios. These findings demonstrate the promise of the structured decision-making framework for building more reliable autonomous AI applications in safety-critical contexts.

Authors: Dcruz, JG; Zolotas, A; Greenwood, NR; Arana-Catania, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Nature Research
• Journal: Scientific Reports
• Volume: 15
• Issue: 1
• Article number: 32093
• Publication date: 2025-09-01
• Acceptance date: 2025-08-06
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-15317-w
• EISSN: 2045-2322
• Language: English
• Keywords: Responsible AI; Structured decision-making