A Chatbot System to Support Mine Safety Procedures during Natural Disasters

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.