Integrating Decision Support and Knowledge Capture for Crisis Operations

Stottler Henke proposes an innovative approach to supporting crisis response operations that will allow for increased situational awareness and improved response time. We will accomplish these goals using a two-pronged approach. First, we will provide improved workflow management and activity monitoring that will improve crisis response by ensuring that the right work is done by the right people at the right time, while simultaneously providing supervisors with a bird's eye view of the current situation, the performance of team members, and any bottlenecks that may occur. Second, we will embed task selection in a context-aware information retrieval and knowledge capture environment. This environment will provide support for retrieval of existing procedural documents, such as checklists and SOPs, based on intelligent queries formed from sensor data, online chat, and user input. In addition, users will have access to historical cases, lessons learned, and information repositories that will provide crucial guidance in crisis situations not fully covered by existing procedures. Finally, all available incident data will be collected for assisted report generation and stored in a case repository to benefit future crisis resolution and to provide content for scenario-based trainers. Phase II will result in a fully functional prototype suitable for commercialization.