Improving emergency responder situational awareness for Incident command systems (ICS) using critical information management, simulation, and analysis

Incident command systems (ICS) are flexible and reliable organizational structures that can be adapted for responding to emergency situations such as fire fighting, earthquakes, and terrorist attacks such as the synchronized distributed terrorist attacks of 9/11 and more recently Mumbai attacks. ICS often requires the temporary assembly members from multiple organizations to respond to emergencies, requiring speedy, efficient, and effective decision making that can only be achieved through best practices of information management. ICS involves the integration of emergency responders from diverse organizations including fire fighting, police, medical, and military. Information management and communication presents a key technical challenge to ICS especially because of the cross-organizational need to enable a common operational picture and the need to ensure that critical information gets to the right organizations and individuals at the right time. This research investigates this challenge and the use of various methodologies to meet the challenge including semantic, modeling, and simulation technologies.