Developing shared situational awareness for emergency management
The response efforts in emergency operation need to be fast and efficient. Actors from different fields have to cooperate in dynamic and complex environments and still in an efficient manner. In order to perform, the shared situation awareness of the response organization needs to be as good as possible. The purpose of our research was to identify the factors that affect the of shared situation awareness in search and rescue operations. The research is based on the theories of information, communication, and trust. The data collection was performed during a search and rescue exercise held in Finland in 2009 and included both and questionnaires. As a result we have defined the critical information needs for cooperation, a method for describing the communication, and the components of system trust. Emergency organizations can use the results in the development of their response activities.
To determine what is critical information for the CCRRS we divided the approach into critical information, i.e. the minimum SSA needs of the CCRRS, and action-triggering information, i.e. the minimum SA needs of an organization or actor.
Observations, Survey, Interview
Critical informationTo classify information, an improved versions of the classifications of information for SAR operation is used (Nissinen, 2009)Pg 4Communication-who with whom -the nature of the interaction, using four types of social context (informal/formal; face-to-face/virtual)
The material was collected in the SAR 2009 exercise that took place in 2009 in the Helsinki metropolitan area in Finland; The exercise is planned and carried out annually by the same group of organizations but with a changing scenario.
During search and rescue exercise held in the Helsinki metropolitan area in Finland in 2009, including both and questionnaires
Goal:The purpose of our research was to identify the factors that affect the of shared situation awareness in search and rescue operations. Pg 1The hypothesis is that it is possible to find such SSA elements that help to split the development of SAR activities into more concrete and realizable phases. Pg 2Our first goal was to specify the critical information needs of the SAR operation on the operational level. In order to develop fluency in communication the different means of communication need to be described. Our second goal was to describe how different actors communicate during an SAR operation. Our third goal was to study in more detail the role of trust in the SAR context. Trust has influence both on the quality and on the fluency of communication. The systematic development of trust is easier when we know the elements which trust comprises. The presumption in our research was that a certain amount of trust exists between actors. However, if trust could be increased the availability,reliability, and temporal accuracy of information could be improved. Pg 2
When collecting the critical information needs with questionnaires, we faced some challenges. The response rate was only 25% and the responses were not as specific as we expected. This led to an extra comment round for subject matter experts. The definition of the critical information elements was especially challenging for the human agents. One reason might be that part of the SA is based on tacit knowledge and thus difficult to specify, even though actors knew what they need. Other reason can be that the information sharing processes are not fully established. By specifying the critical information needs, we know what information elements need to be shared in minimum to perform the core tasks.The method of observing different types of communication andmodeling of the social contexts approved to be useful. It enablesthe and graphical presentation of how actors communicate. It can also be used to improve communication processes to better support the SSA. A limitation in the method is that communication is modeled as static social contexts. Therefore, the communication is modeled as it occurs at a particular moment in the situation, even though the situation changes during the operation.Another limitation is that the activity level of the communicationprocesses is not shown in the social context model. Therefore, allsocial contexts seem to be equally important in the graphical model,which may cause misunderstandings.The observation method that was used in this study is not sufficient to obtain a comprehensive and quantitative understanding about the level of trust in the cooperation. Therefore, it could be useful if human agents could themselves first evaluate the level of trust in each of those components. This evaluation could be done formally in the next SAR exercise.
Definition of the critical information, needs for cooperation, a method for describing the communication, and the components of system trust.•specify the critical information needs and action-triggering information,•describe how actors communicate, •outline the components of system trust in the SAR 2009 operation
identify the factors that affect the of shared situation awareness in search and rescue operations. 1. Goal was to specify the critical information needs of the SAR operation on the operational level 2.Goal was to describe how different actors communicate during an SAR operation 3.Goal was to study in more detail the role of trust in the SAR context
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