DisasterBench: Benchmarking LLM Planning under Typed Tool Interface Constraints

Abstract: Disasters cause severe societal impacts, demanding rapid coordination of heterogeneous AI tools, from satellite analysis to flood prediction and damage assessment, into coherent multi-step workflows. As LLMs increasingly serve as orchestrators of such pipelines, effective coordination requires more than selecting semantically plausible tools: LLMs must generate executable workflows with correct parameter binding and dependency propagation. We introduce DisasterBench, a benchmark for evaluating structured multi-agent planning over semantically similar but operationally distinct disaster-response tools. To enable step-level failure attribution, we further propose First-Point-of-Failure (FPoF), which localizes the earliest root cause in a predicted workflow, separating primary errors from downstream cascading effects. Our evaluation reveals three findings: planning method effectiveness depends strongly on model capacity; tool mismatch and parameter-binding errors dominate first failures, revealing semantic grounding and execution consistency as distinct bottlenecks; and verbose intermediate reasoning can create instruction clash with structured output requirements, disrupting plan generation. Together, these findings highlight a fundamental gap between semantic reasoning and execution-grounded coordination, underscoring the need for planning frameworks that jointly model semantic intent, execution constraints, and workflow consistency. Code, data, and evaluation resources are available at: https://github.com/TamuChen18/DisasterBench_Open