Situation Awareness and Decision Support Tools for Response Phase of Emergency Management: A Short Survey

Natural and man-made disasters increasingly menace global population, often bringing immense material loss and destruction, taking huge tolls in human lives, and impose involuntary migrations. In the imminent crisis aftermath, emergency managers and decision makers require a real-time holistic situation overview to guide and generate rapid decision action plan. Traditional emergency management tools simply are unable to deliver [4], instead they incur large delays and gaps in knowledge. Modern technological solutions are needed to generate a quick feedback loop from the in-situ filed situation. In this paper we provide a short overview of current state of the art commercial, open-source, and research emergency management tools aiming for recovery phase: situation assessment and decision support tools. We briefly introduce general end-user requirements that such emergency management tools should fulfil.