Decision making to support local emergency preparation, response, and recovery

Effective emergency management depends upon accurate information, especially in the case of disaster scale preparation, recovery, and response. As recent experience demonstrates, leveraging situational information is critical to community recovery. Critical incident management involves the fusion of variant informational sources leveraged through collection technologies onto a common organizational platform. Fusion of information requires a clear delineation of informational needs, flows, and interactions. Variability and uncertainty in the data must be addressed and accounted for. The compatibility and reliability of the data must also be fully defined. In the best circumstances, the platform would also guide the decision-maker in action by guiding the method by which the decision is executed. This paper discusses decision support system model development and demonstrates applicability to regional emergency management operations.