Abstract: Natural and man-made hazards have many unexpected consequences that concern as many heterogeneous services. The GéNéPi project offers to support officials in addressing those events: its purpose is to support the collaboration in the field and the decision-making in the crisis cells. To succeed, the GéNéPi system needs to be aware of the ongoing crisis developments. For now, its best chance is to benefit from the ever growing number of available data sources. One of its goals is, therefore, to learn how to manage numerous, heterogeneous, more or less reliable data, in order to interpret them, in time, for the officials. The result consists on a situation model in the shape of a common operational picture. This paper describes every stage of modelling from the raw data selection, to the use of the situation model itself.

Abstract: Post hoc evaluations made of crisis situations and exercises often point at communication as an important reason for the failure of the management and coordination of the crisis. Crisis managers have to deal with the problem that they (and all other actors in the field) don't have the right information to coordinate the efforts and solve the crisis situation. This paper examines the relation between the information available – more specifically the richness of the information and the distribution of the information – And the management and coordination of a typical man-made fast-burning crisis. The literature on decision making and situation awareness is reviewed and an experiment is conducted with 40 crisis managers in Belgium to assess the impact of the information. Initial results indicate a relationship between the ways a crisis team receives information and the achieved level of situation awareness, the difficulty of making decisions and the perceived complexity of the crisis.

Abstract: When facing emergency scenarios, several contingent factors may strongly condition the pre-defined response procedures. The proposed approach takes the perspective that an emergency response tool may guide the response effort. The tool adopts a conceptual model grounded on existing situation awareness models and research work done with High Reliability Organizations. The model structures the emergency management process in a set of dimensions that should be collaboratively correlated by the involved participants in order to mitigate the disruptive situation. An instantiation of the proposed approach is also described in the paper, focusing on IT service desk teams addressing emergency incidents that may compromise business continuity.

Abstract: A convenient way to test Urban Search And Rescue (USAR) robots would be in virtual environments (VEs). Evaluations in VEs are generally accepted as alternative for real scenarios. There are obvious differences between operation in a real and virtual environment. Nonetheless, the current experiment showed no significant differences in situation awareness (SA) and performance during several elementary tasks (e.g. slalom) between a virtual world and a previous experiment in reality (Mioch, Smets, & Neerincx, 2012). Only small dependencies between the unit tasks were found. The effect of individual differences (like gender, km driven per year, and gaming experience), were significant for certain elementary tasks. Testing robots in virtual environments could still be useful even if differences between VE and reality exist, since comparisons of different conditions in VE seems to have the same results as the same comparison in the field (Bishop & Rohrmann, 2003; Van Diggelen, Looije, Mioch, Neerincx, & Smets, 2012).

Abstract: This paper presents findings from a design-oriented study focusing on emergency response work. Traditionally, information technology for emergency response work has included enroute navigation advice, resource management, hazard material databases, property information repositories, and situation reporting using sketching functionality. Now, a new class of information technology has become available, namely mobile live video capabilities. This paper presents initial findings from a study on how mobile live video capabilities could improve information sharing and situation awareness in emergency response work.

Abstract: When an adverse event escalates into a criminal investigation, it becomes very difficult to control and combine information into a manageable format. The PROBE project addresses this problem by developing two generations of working prototypes capable of undergoing live field tests and evaluation by a wide-ranging community of CBRNE (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, Explosives) responders. The paper reports the derivation of preliminary user requirements for PROBE based on interviews and observations of a large-scale simulated CBRNE exercise. Five Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers shadowed specialists representing different responder agencies (Emergency Medical Services, police, hazardous materials expert) during the three-hour exercise. Relying on cognitive ethnography, a variant of the concept of distributed cognition, video and audio recordings were merged with notes taken during the exercise and used to derive the preliminary user requirements. The study showed that these could be extracted from a relatively small set of behaviors and different types of utterances made by the active participants in the exercise. The paper concludes with a take-away message for researchers wishing to observe CBRNE exercises in which the command post event management team is collocated.

Abstract: Fielded first responders are currently being equipped with support tools to improve their performance and safety. Novel information technology provides opportunities for improvement of task efficiency and situation awareness, but people can get in trouble when data networks fail. In this paper, we examine the effect of glitches in the data network on team performance and look into the strategies people use to cope with these disruptions. Teams of three responders collaborated in a search and rescue task, supported by a map showing their positions and the locations of victims. Data communication required for this support was interrupted, verbal communication remained possible. Two variants were used for the map: a north-up version and a heading-up version that was aligned with the orientation of the responder. Negative effects and changing strategies were found for the condition with interruptions, no differences were found for the two map variants.

Abstract: Building up proper situation awareness is one of the most difficult tasks in the beginning stages of large-scale accidents. As ambiguous information about the events becomes available, decision makers are often tempted to quickly choose a particular story to explain the events. Subsequent information that contradicts the initial story may easily be discarded and cognitive tunnel vision takes over. Our approach, as part of the COMBINED Systems project, is to prevent tunnel vision by providing critical thinking support. In a laboratory experiment with 60 participants, we tested this hypothesis by comparing the Critical Thinking tool with a 'no support' control condition and a 'minimal support' condition. Participants acted as crisis managers determining the likely cause of an accident based on different pieces of information. The results show a positive impact of the tool on both the decision making process and decision making effectiveness.

Abstract: The importance of situation awareness systems in crisis-management scenarios cannot be emphasised enough. These systems enable entire disaster situations to be mapped out in a real-time fashion thereby aiding significantly in human decision-making and the necessary positioning, management and deployment of resources. As a result of the core role these systems play in responding to crises, it is vital that they are highly usable and optimized for human cognition and experience. In this paper we consider this reality in the context of an initial evaluation of the visualisation interface of a situation-awareness tool called Secure Situation Awareness (SSA). Our evaluation seeks to gather useful feedback from potential end-users on the usability of the tool's interface to feed into the design and development of interfaces for similar systems. © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: We designed two decision support tools and employed them during a one-week, simulation-driven experiment that included emergency responders acting in their real-life roles. Each tool visualized a “decision space”: A diagrammatic depiction of the relative desirability of one option versus another, including the inherent uncertainty in the potential outcomes. One requirement was to develop a tool accounting for the impacts of decisions on others, so that emergency responders can make “sympathetic decisions.” For example, one decision space enabled responders to request resources from surrounding jurisdictions while also considering the potential negative effects on the lending organizations. Another decision space enabled responders to engage in a strategic dialogue with the public: “listening” to the public's greatest concerns by mining social media to measure emotion, and thereby suggesting strategic communications addressing those concerns. We report how we designed the decision spaces and the qualitative results of using these spaces during the experiment.

Abstract: This paper describes five problem areas of communication that occur during crisis response. These areas are communication infrastructure, situation awareness, individual and organizational common ground, form and content of messages, and communication paths through organizations. Five focus groups with Swedish field personnel from national and international crises were performed. The main contribution of this article is a hypothesis, based on the outcomes of the focus groups, about the relation between communication problems and how they interact with crisis response work.

Abstract: In this contribution, we introduce a prototype of a decision support tool for cost-optimal response in security management. The threat situation of a closed infrastructure, exposed to multiple threats, and the corresponding response actions are modeled by a continuous-time Markov decision process (CMDP). Since the CMDP cannot be solved exactly for large infrastructures, the response actions are determined from a heuristic, based on an index rule. The decision support tool's user interface displays the infrastructure's current threat state and proposes the heuristic response actions to the decision maker. In this way, global situation awareness can be enhanced and the decision maker is able to initiate an almost cost-optimal response action in short time.