Group Information Foraging in Emergency Response: An Illustration Incorporating Discrete-Event Simulation

Large-scale emergencies require groups of response personnel to seek and handle information from an evolving range of sources in order to meet an evolving set of goals, often under conditions of high risk. Because emergencies induce time constraint, efforts spent on planning activities reduce the time available for execution activities. This paper discusses the design and implementation of a discrete-event simulation system used for assessing how risk and time constraint can impact group information seeking and handling (i.e., foraging) during emergency response. A demonstration is given of how system parameters may be tuned in order to manipulate risk, time constraint, distribution of information and resources available for response. The results of a pilot test of the implemented system are briefly discussed. Finally, ongoing extensions of this simulation are discussed