In this study, a system supporting disaster surveillance and response decisions is investigated. In a multisensor surveillance system, distributed sensor nodes such as cameras can sense, monitor, and collect data continuously. To recognize an urgent situation and make a decision in response, distributed reasoning agents should be able to analyze and process various surveillance data in real time. However, the loss of resources such as sensor nodes and communication paths may occur during the overall process. Therefore, a safer data delivery system with shorter delays is needed. In this paper, a more reliable node management architecture based on energy-efficient algorithms is proposed to fulfill this need. This architecture determines the path of a packet from either the events generating the packet, the local environmental conditions, or the states of the adjacent nodes to improve the stability, energy efficiency, and delay guarantee of the system. To find the path for the required data, an ant colony optimization algorithm is adopted. This algorithm reduces the decision time and cache processing time resulting in low energy consumption. The performance analysis of the proposed method shows that the scheme improves the system reliability by controlling the parameters of each node.