Emergency situations occur unpredictably and cause individuals and organizations to shift their focus and attention immediately to deal with the situation. When disasters become large scale, all the limitations resulting from a lack of integration and collaboration among all the involved organizations begin to be exposed and further compound the negative consequences of the event. Often in large-scale disasters the people who must work together have no history of doing so; they have not developed a trust or understanding of one another’s abilities, and the totality of resources they each bring to bear have never before been exercised. As a result, the challenges for individual or group decision support systems (DSS) in emergency situations are diverse and immense. In this contribution, we present recent advances in this area and highlight important challenges that remain.

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Decision support for emergency situations

An effective incident information management system needs to deal with several challenges. It must support heterogeneous distributed incident data, allow decision makers (DMs) to detect anomalies and extract useful knowledge, assist DMs in evaluating the risks and selecting an appropriate alternative during an incident, and provide differentiated services to satisfy the requirements of different incident management phases. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an incident information management framework that consists of three major components. The first component is a high-level data integration module in which heterogeneous data sources are integrated and presented in a uniform format. The second component is a data mining module that uses data mining methods to identify useful patterns and presents a process to provide differentiated services for pre-incident and post-incident information management. The third component is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) module that utilizes MCDM methods to assess the current situation, find the satisfactory solutions, and take appropriate responses in a timely manner. To validate the proposed framework, this paper conducts a case study on agrometeorological disasters that occurred in China between 1997 and 2001. The case study demonstrates that the combination of data mining and MCDM methods can provide objective and comprehensive assessments of incident risks.

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An incident information management framework based on data integration, data mining, and multi-criteria decision making

Decision Behaviour, Analysis and Support seeks to explore the interplay between the perspectives of many different disciplines in understanding how we may help decision makers to deliberate and decide better. The book is virtually unique in both its breadth and its recognition that the characteristics of decision making situations vary greatly and hence that the form of support required varies too. The study considers both the use of computers and databases to support decisions as well as human aids to building analyses and some fast and frugal tricks to aid more consistent decision making. In its exploration of decision support it draws together results and observations from, inter alia, decision theory, behavioural and psychological studies, artificial intelligence and information systems, philosophy, operational research and organisational studies. It spans the range of decision contexts from individual choice through decision making in groups and organisations to societal choice. One strength is in its discussion of the manner in which unaided intuitive decision making may be flawed and using this to drive the development of prescriptive support help real decision makers towards more rational decisions. The style is accessible to a wide range of disciplines, assuming little more than everyday knowledge of the many disciplines on which it draws.

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Decision Behaviour, Analysis and Support

Environmental emergency situations can differ in many ways, for instance according to their causes and the dimension of their impacts. Yet, they share the characteristic of sudden onset and the necessity for a coherent and effective emergency management. In this paper we consider decision support in the event of a nuclear or radiological accident in Europe. RODOS, an acronym for real-time on-line decision support system, is a decision support system designed to provide support from the early phases through to the medium and long-term phases. This work highlights the role of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) within RODOS in ensuring the transparency of decision processes within emergency and remediation management. Special emphasis is placed on the evaluation of alternative remediation or countermeasure strategies using the multi-criteria decision support tool Web-HIPRE in scenario focused decision making workshops involving different stakeholder and expert groups. Decision support is enhanced by a module that generates natural language explanations to facilitate the understanding of the evaluation process, therefore contributing to the direct involvement of the decision makers, with the aim of increasing their confidence in the results of the analyses carried out, forming an audit trail for the decision making process and improving the acceptability of the system as a whole.

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Multi-criteria decision support and evaluation of strategies for nuclear remediation management

The varied contexts of environmental decision problems and their implications for decision support

In the thirteen years that have elapsed since the Chernobyl accident, many studies and developments have been made with the aim of improving our response to any future accident. One project has been the development of a decision support system to aid emergency management. rodos, a Real time online Decision support system for nuclear emergency management, has been built by a consortium of many institutes across Europe and the cis. As it approaches (standby!) operational use, we face the task of tailoring the output to meet the specific needs of users and simultaneously opening up their minds to full potential of a modern decision support system (dss). This paper reports a number of investigations into the decision support needs of the competent national safety authorities and reflects on the implications of rodos for the emergency management process.

J. Lochard

Papers

Rodos: Decision Support for Nuclear Emergencies

Summary and conclusions: capabilities and challenges

What sort of support is needed in nuclear emergency management? Proceedings of DSI-Conference, Athens, Greece 1999, 5 pp