Distributed decision making – Fire-In project

Description

Identify roles and capabilities from different agencies and stakeholders in the emergency.
Build a shared understanding concerning scenario and strategy across responders to synchronize simultaneous decision-making. Manage complex information focusing on the multiple levels of decision-making.
Management by objectives, giving flexibility and autonomy in decision making. Lower decision making. Distributed decision-making based on assigned missions, on common objectives and a shared understanding on situation.
Identify points of coordination in the different zones: from local (hot zone, warm zone …) to regional to national. Establish different levels of liaison officers, translators, communication and infrastructures as needed.

#ICS #EuropeanInteragencyFramework #cross-borderaids #liasonofficer #interoperatibility #eucpm

Possible Solutions

Name	Provider (company, project, organization)	Short description
HEIMDALL project: enhance cooperation and inter-organisational coordination	http://heimdall-h2020.eu/	Solutions to enhance cooperation and inter-organisational coordination, based on technologies already existing or currently under development
WUIWATCH project (Wildland – Urban Interface Forest Fire Risk Observatory and Interest Group in Europe )	https://wuiwatch.org/	The objective is to create and consolidate a European Observatory on prevention and defence against forest fires affecting urban areas and communities in the so called Wildland-Urban interfaces (WUI) in Europe by assembling a permanent forum and a special interest group.
Collaboration Capabilities for Crisis Management	Beaton, E. K.; Boiney, L. G.; Drury, J. L.; GreenPope, R. A.; Henriques, R. D.; Howland, M. D.; Klein, G. L. (2009); Wmsci 2010: 14th World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics, Vol I, 385–390	When a crisis such as 9/11 occurs, it requires coordination and collaboration by a number of government agencies – as well as the private sector – with tightly choreographed activities from many organizations in multiple locations. Although there are accepted collaboration frameworks for operating in a “command and control” mode, where everyone understands who is in charge and what everyone’s responsibilities are, there is not yet an accepted multi-agency “coordinate and collaborate” framework specifically designed for crisis management with less clear lines of authority. This paper presents Part I of a three-part framework that explicitly addresses the multiple characteristics of crisis management collaboration: time-sensitivity, synchronicity, non-collocation, and unrelated organizations. This first part of the framework identifies and describes the collaboration capabilities needed to support such crisis management, using United States aviation security as an example domain because it has all of the characteristics described above. Based on a literature search, governance review, and 19 on-site interviews with many aviation security stakeholders, we synthesize the common challenges discovered into 13 essential collaboration capabilities. We generalize these collaboration capabilities beyond the specifics of the aviation security domain so that other crisis management environments that experience cross-organizational, time-sensitive, safety-critical collaboration, such as disaster response or joint military command and control, may leverage concepts from this framework to organize information about their collaboration challenges and solutions. Finally, using an actual aviation security incident, we illustrate the value of systematically identifying and addressing collaboration capability shortfalls.
Collaboration Exercises	Berlin, Johan M.; Carlstrom, Eric D. (2015); Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 23(1), 11–23	This article aims to study whether exercises contribute to learning that can be useful in actual emergency work. It reports the findings of a study about professional emergency personnel’s perceptions of the impact of collaboration exercises. Surveys were distributed and collected from emergency personnel in conjunction with three collaboration exercises that took place in Sweden in spring 2012. The survey included personnel holding different positions within the police department, fire department and ambulance services. Among them were also operational personnel such as officers. A total of 94 professional emergency personnel agreed to participate by answering the survey. The response rate was 95%. The study shows that collaborative elements in exercises contribute to perceived learning (R-2=0:53), and that learning, in turn, has a perceived beneficial effect on actual emergency work (R-2=0:26). The perceived results of collaboration, learning and their impact on actual emergency work, however, are moderate. The exercises were characterised by long waiting times and gave few opportunities to practise different strategies. Only a few respondents felt that they learned something about the collaborating organisations’ ways of communicating and prioritising. Many also thought that the exercises were more useful for command officers than for operational personnel. Thus, the study shows that by strengthening the collaborative elements of the exercises, the perception of the participants’ actual emergency work can be developed.
CRISIS MANAGEMENT EVALUATION	Boersma, Kees; Passenier, David; Mollee, Julia; van der Wal, C. Natalie (2013); Proceedings 26th European Conference on Modelling and Simulation Ecms 2012, 325-	Communication and inter-organizational coordination in crisis management are of uttermost important for all processes and can lead to fast and effective averting or ending of a crisis situation. In this paper, a real world incident of a fire in the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol train tunnel was formalised, based on a public inquiry report, and subsequently, the emergency response to the incident was analysed by means of automatic property checking. It is shown how this approach is a convenient and effective manner to analyse communication and coordination practices in crisis management and to evaluate what went wrong, where and when.
Site management of health issues in the 2001 World Trade Center disaster	Bradt, D. A. (2009): Academic Emergency Medicine, 10(6), 650–660	The terrorist destruction of the World Trade Center led to the greatest loss of life from a criminal incident in the history of the United States. There were 2,801 persons killed or missing at the disaster site, including 147 dead on two hijacked aircraft. Hundreds of buildings sustained direct damage or contamination. Forty different agencies responded with command and control exercised by an incident command system as well as an emergency operations center. Dozens of hazards complicated relief and recovery efforts. Five victims were rescued from the rubble. Up to 1,000 personnel worked daily at the World Trade Center disaster site. These workers collectively made an average of 270 daily presentations to health care providers in the first month post-disaster. Of presentations for clinical symptoms, leading clinical diagnoses were ocular injuries, headaches, and lung injuries. Mechanical injury accounted for 39% of clinical presentations and appeared preventable by personal protective equipment. Limitations emerged in the site application of emergency triage and clinical care. Notable assets in the site management of health issues include action plans from the incident command system, geographic information system products, wireless application technology, technical consensus among health and safety authorities, and workers’ respite care.
Preparing for complex interdependent risks	Cavallo, Antonella; Ireland, Vernon (2015); International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 9, 181–193	The uncertainty posed by natural and human-made disasters arises from both known risks and a range of unforeseeable risks, some of which may be novel, not having been observed before. These interconnected risks may evolve over short periods of time and may feed into one another. In a network of multiple causes and effects, such risks may not be foreseeable at the disaster preparedness level, and may only be observed at the time of disaster response. This creates a higher level of complexity and requires new approaches with individual organizations and members needing to make decisions outside predefined frameworks and hierarchical command control structures while still operating in the ethos of their organizations. This study advocates the need for disaster preparedness strategies to go beyond linear approaches to risk management. This is necessary in order to better address complex interdependent risks where such risks may be novel or unforeseen and which may connect in a cascading manner. The resulting causal network needs to be addressed with a networked approach to enrich existing linear approaches by recognizing the need for an interconnected holistic approach to deal appropriately with interconnected risk factors. This paper Lakes an interpretive perspective rather than the more typical positivist one System of Systems (SUS) and complex systems thinking were used to inform a sense making framework to distinguish between approaches to known/knowable and unknown risks. Finally, the paper reports on how this framework was used in South Australia on three different scales of the SoS: community, NGOs and government. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Building a Birds Eye View	Fischer, Joel E.; Reeves, Stuart; Rodden, Tom; Reece, Steven; Ramchurn, Sarvapali D.; Jones, David (2013); Chi 2015: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Chi Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 4103–4112	Command and control environments ranging from transport control rooms to disaster response have long been of interest to HCI and CSCW as rich sites of interactive technology use embedded in work practice. Drawing on our engagement with disaster response teams, including ethnography of their training work, we unpack the ways in which situational uncertainty is managed while a shared operational ‘picture’ is constituted through various practices around tabletop work. Our analysis reveals how this picture is collaboratively assembled as a socially shared object and displayed by drawing on digital and physical resources. Accordingly, we provide a range of principles implicated by our study that guide the design of systems augmenting and enriching disaster response work practices. In turn, we propose the Augmented Bird Table to illustrate how our principles can be implemented to support tabletop work.
Improving crisis management in the imperfect world of foreign electoral assistance	Hirschmann, D. (2009); Public Administration and Development, 18(1), 23–36	This article’s primary focus is on improving techniques of crisis management of electoral assistance. In so doing it intends to contribute to a more systematic sharing of information about lessons learned and possible responses to the pressure of providing electoral support when time is short. It is therefore concerned with situations in which there are not only the usual large gaps between ideal and reality, a host of imperfections and uncertainties, a multiplicity of chains of command and conflicting agendas, a shortage of resources, and endless possibilities for genuine and crafted misunderstandings, but also a lack of time for analysis and preparation. The article looks at such ‘rushed’ electoral assistance from the perspective of the ‘manager’; this is a term that will serve as shorthand for a hypothetical electoral assistance manager in an international governmental or non-governmental donor agency who is given responsibility for managing the assistance but is usually not part of the political or policy-making office of his or her embassy or agency. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
SUSTAINING NETWORKS IN EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT A Study of Counties in the United States	Kapucu, Naim; Garayev, Vener; Wang, Xiaohu (2015); Public Performance & Management Review, 37(1), 104–133	The increasing scope and severity of disasters has led to the wide adoption of collaborative practices through networks in the field of emergency management. Networks are most effective when they can be sustained over time. This study develops a model of the factors that influence network sustainability in emergency management. Using data from a national survey of county emergency managers in the United States, the study finds that convergence of organizational goals, utilization of information and communication technology, and, most important, interorganizational trust are all significant influences on network sustainability in emergency management. The results indicate the significant role of trust-building among emergency managers in sustaining an emergency management network.
Regional coordination in medical emergencies and major incidents; plan, execute and teach	Khorram-Manesh, Amir; Hedelin, Annika; Ortenwall, Per (2013); Scandinavian Journal of Trauma Resuscitation & Emergency Medicine, 17	Background: Although disasters and major incidents are difficult to predict, the results can be mitigated through planning, training and coordinated management of available resources. Following a fire in a disco in Gothenburg, causing 63 deaths and over 200 casualties, a medical disaster response centre was created. The center was given the task to coordinate risk assessments, disaster planning and training of staff within the region and on an executive level, to be the point of contact (POC) with authority to act as “gold control,” i.e. to take immediate strategic command over all medical resources within the region if needed. The aim of this study was to find out if the centre had achieved its tasks by analyzing its activities. Methods: All details concerning alerts of the regional POC was entered a web-based log by the duty officer. The data registered in this database was analyzed during a 3-year period. Results: There was an increase in number of alerts between 2006 and 2008, which resulted in 6293 activities including risk assessments and 4473 contacts with major institutions or key persons to coordinate or initiate actions. Eighty five percent of the missions were completed within 24 h. Twenty eight exercises were performed of which 4 lasted more than 24 h. The centre also offered 145 courses in disaster and emergency medicine and crisis communication. Conclusion: The data presented in this study indicates that the center had achieved its primary tasks. Such regional organization with executive, planning, teaching and training responsibilities offers possibilities for planning, teaching and training disaster medicine by giving immediate feedback based on real incidents.
Multidisciplinary coordination of on-scene command teams in virtual emergency exercises	van Ruijven, Theo; Mayer, Igor; Bruijne, Mark de (2009); International Journal of Critical Infrastructure Protection, 9, 13–23	This paper presents the design and the results of a comparative study of multidisciplinary on-scene command teams at work in virtual emergency training exercises. The principal goals of the study were to understand how “on-scene command teams” coordinate on multidisciplinary objectives and tasks, and how the manner in which this is done affects their performance. The study involved 20 on-scene command teams consisting of various individuals, such as police, fire and medical services personnel, municipal officers and infrastructure operators, drawn from a Safety Region in The Netherlands. Integrated video recordings by five synchronized cameras captured the coordination processes during the virtual exercises. The integrated and synchronized video recordings were then transformed into numerical data for analysis. Performance was operationalized by scoring the progress and completion of emergency management tasks for which individual members and/or teams as a whole were responsible. Team coordination was operationalized using network centrality and density measures. The significant findings are the following (i) emergency management performance and coordination patterns within and among on-scene command teams have considerable variation; and (ii) teams that use less coordination during the intermediate phases of emergency management perform significantly better than teams that do not; moreover, actors who have central positions in a network are better able to achieve their performance goals. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
The Common Operational Picture as Collective Sensemaking	Wolbers, Jeroen; Boersma, Kees (2015); Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 21(4), 186–199	The common operational picture is used to overcome coordination and information management problems during emergency response. Increasingly, this approach is incorporated in more advanced information systems. This is rooted in an information warehouse’ perspective, which implies information can be collected, sorted and exchanged in an accessible and univocal form. In practice, however, professionals interpret similar information differently. Therefore, we focus on how emergency responders develop collective sensemaking from information. We employ a trading zone’ perspective, in which information is negotiated, to study information management in an ethnographic study of disaster exercises in the Netherlands. Our analysis shows how professionals attribute different meanings to information that distorts the coordination process. We end by stressing the importance of actionable knowledge and reflexivity.