Scenario-Based Marine Oil Spill Emergency Response Using Hybrid Deep Reinforcement Learning and Case-Based Reasoning

Case-based reasoning (CBR) systems often provide a basis for decision makers to make management decisions in disaster prevention and emergency response. For decades, many CBR systems have been implemented by using expert knowledge schemes to build indexes for case identification from a case library of situations and to explore the relations among cases. However, a knowledge elicitation bottleneck occurs for many knowledge-based CBR applications because expert reasoning is difficult to precisely explain. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a method using only knowledge to recognize marine oil spill cases. The proposed method combines deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with strategy selection to determine emergency responses for marine oil spill accidents by quantification of the marine oil spill scenario as the reward for the DRL agent. These accidents are described by scenarios and are considered the state inputs in the hybrid DRL/CBR framework. The challenges and opportunities of the proposed method are discussed considering different scenarios and the intentions of decision makers. This approach may be helpful in terms of developing hybrid DRL/CBR-based tools for marine oil spill emergency response.