Abstract: To face the urgent need to train strategic and operational managers in dealing with complex crises, we are researching and developing an innovative decision support system to be used for crisis management and interactive crisis training. This paper provides an overview of current decision-support systems, simulation software and other technologies specifically designed to serve crisis managers. These findings inform the design of a new interactive simulation technology system, where a 3D Common Operational Picture (COP) is shared between tactile digital whiteboard in the command center and mobile devices in the field. © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: When disaster strikes, the emerging task environment requires relief agencies to transform from autonomous mono-disciplinary organizations into interdependent multidisciplinary decision-making units. Evaluation studies reveal that adaptation of information management to the changing task environment is difficult resulting in poor information quality, indicating information was incorrect, outdated or even unavailable to relief workers. In this paper, we adopt a theory-driven approach to develop a set of information management roles and dynamic capabilities for disaster management. Building on the principles of advance structuring and dynamic adjustment, we develop a set of roles and capabilities, which we illustrate and extend using two field studies in the Netherlands. By studying regional relief workers in action, we found that in tactical disaster response decisionmaking units, several information management roles are not addressed and that information managers are preoccupied with information gathering and reporting, whereas information quality assurance is not on the agenda.

Abstract: Relief agency managers show growing interest in dashboards for assessing multi-agency disaster preparedness. Yet, there is a dearth of research on the development and use of dashboards for disaster preparation. Consequently, information system architects in the disaster management domain have little guidance in developing dashboards. Here, dashboards refer to digitalized visualizations of performance indicators. In this paper, we discuss the experiences gained from an action research project on the development of dashboards for assessing disaster preparedness. The objective of this paper is to discuss experiences and tradeoffs extracted from the development of dashboards in practice. We organized a two-day gaming-simulation with relief agency managers for the evaluation of the dashboards. While the relief agency managers acknowledged the usefulness of dashboards in the disaster preparation process and expressed their intention to use these in practice, they suggested that the formulation and clustering of performance indicators requires further research.

Abstract: Decision making in extreme events presents a difficult challenge to emergency managers who are legally responsible for protecting life, property, and maintaining continuity of operations for their respective organizations or communities. Prior research has identified the benefits of gaining situation awareness in rapidly changing disaster contexts, but situation awareness is not always sufficient. We have investigated “option awareness” and the decision space to provide cognitive support for emergency managers to simulate computationally possible outcomes of different options before they make a decision. Employing a user-centered design process, we developed a computational model that rapidly generates ranges of likely outcomes for different options and displays them visually through a prototype decision-space interface that allows rapid comparison of the options. Feedback from emergency managers suggests that decision spaces may enable emergency managers to consider a wider range of options for decisions and may facilitate more targeted, effective decision making under uncertain conditions.

Abstract: This paper presents the results of our research on the development of a Dialog Action Manager-DAM as part of a complex crisis management system. Imagine the utility of such an automatic system to detect the crisis and to provide support to people in contexts similar to what happened recently at the underground in London and Madrid. Preventing and handling the scenarios of terrorism and other crisis are nowadays maybe the most important issues for a modern and safe society. In order to automate the crisis support, DAM simulates the behavior of an employee at the crisis centre handling telephone calls from human observers. Firstly, the system has to mimic the natural support for the paradigm 'do you hear me?' and next for the paradigm 'do you understand me?'. The people witnessing the crisis event as well as human experts provide reports and expertise according to their observations and knowledge on the crisis. The system knowledge and the data communication follow the XML format specifications. The system is centered on the results of our previous work on creating a user-centered multimodal reporting tool that works on mobile devices. In our paper we describe the mechanisms for creating an automatic DAM system that is able to analyze the user messages, to identify and track the crisis contexts, to support dialogs for crisis information disambiguation and to generate feedback in the form of advice to the users. The reasoning is done by using a data frame and rule based system architecture and an alternative Bayesian Network approach. In the paper we also present a series of experiments we have attempted in our endeavor to correctly identify natural solutions for the crisis situations.

Abstract: This practitioner paper outlines some of the benefits for the use of social media, from the perspective of a local-level or county-level emergency manager (EM). As compared to state and national level emergency management, because local level EMs have limited manpower and resources, social media can positively or negatively impact the effectiveness of communication before, during and after disaster strikes. Outlined in this paper are six key points where local EMs have specific needs that could be addressed by the effective use of social media and, in the opinion of the authors, represent the top issues that EMs face when considering how to leverage Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and other social media platforms. The six needs addressed in this paper include: 1) Best practices for general social media use by EMs, 2) Social media use for internal command and control within the EM group, 3) Developing situation awareness by monitoring social media, especially prior to predicable events, 4) Communicating disaster preparedness messages through social media, 5)Using social media for gathering damage assessment information during, or immediately following a crisis,and 6) Leveraging social media volunteer groups. This short paper picks up where the Federal Emergency Management Agency's social media training leaves off and attempts to represent these six needs as use cases for researchers and developers to address in future publications and products.

Abstract: Exercise managers and instructors have a particularly challenging task in monitoring and controlling on-going exercises, which may involve multiple response teams and organizations in highly complex and continuously evolving crisis situations. Managers and instructors must handle potentially incomplete and conflicting field-observation data and make decisions in real-time in order to control the flow of the exercise and to keep it in line with the training objectives. In simulation-based exercises, managers and instructors have access to a rich set of real-time data, with an increased potential to closely monitor the trainees' actions, and to keep the exercise on track. To assist exercise managers and instructors, data about the on-going exercise can be filtered, aggregated and refined by real-time decision-support systems. We have developed a model and a prototype decision-support system, using stream-based reasoning to assist exercise managers and instructors in real-time. The approach takes advantage of topic maps for ontological representation and a complex-event processing engine for analyzing the data stream from a virtual-reality simulator for crisis-management training. Aggregated data is presented both on-screen, in Twitter, and in the form of topic maps. © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: The United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination (UNDAC) system is designed to assist the United Nations in providing information during the first phase of a sudden-onset emergency and in the coordination of incoming international relief at the site of the emergency. In the immediate aftermath of such an emergency, the UNDAC team will set up an On-Site Operations Coordination Centre (OSOCC) from where the operational activities of the humanitarian organizations responding to the emergency are coordinated. Information management is a key aspect in this phase as the information gathering, processing, and disseminating activities will determine the timeliness and appropriateness of the response by the international humanitarian community. Through participatory observation in the international humanitarian “TRIPLEX” exercise we explore how information managers in the OSOCC make sense of the disaster, how the immediate needs are assessed, and discuss how information systems could improve Sensemaking in these activities.