Workflow Management Tool Support for Incident Command Systems

The dynamics and volunteer-based workforce characteristics of incident command systems raise a challenge to workflow management. Incident command systems must be able to adapt to the ever changing surroundings and tasks during an incident. Furthermore, during an incident, the majority of workers are volunteers that vary in their knowledge of the fundamentals of workflows. To address these challenges, we developed an intuitive, yet formal approach to workflow modeling, enactment and validation. In this paper, we introduce the tool support we designed for this purpose, to show that these two requirements are not contradictory. The expressive power of the approach is demonstrated through an example from an incident command system