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Information Technology Research Opportunities
Information Management
Workshop participants identified several areas in which
improvements in information technology could have a significant
influence on the management of information during each of the four
different phases of crisis management (see Chapter 1). A
fundamental goal of the use of information systems in crisis
management is the ability to supply decision makers at all levels
with the information they need when they need it. The information
users who must be served during a crisis include, among others,
crisis managers themselves, field workers, and victims or potential
victims of a disaster. Supplying decision makers with information
requires a number of capabilities. First, the appropriate data must
be acquired, either as a preparedness activity or during the
response to a crisis. Crisis responders require retrieval and
access mechanisms to allow them to find and reduce to the essential
items the information they need. Delivery mechanisms are needed to
get appropriate information to the right people. Success in each
phase of crisis management depends on successful information
management in the preceding phase. For example, the response relies
on the development of an effective mobilization database and plan
in the preparedness phase, and integration of crisis response
resources depends on the effective tracking of people and other
resources during mobilization.
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Information Acquisition
Several research topics were described to improve acquisition of
better information for use in responding to crises. One challenge
is discrepancies between the data stored in crisis responders'
geographical information system (GIS) databases and the ''ground
truth." For example, crisis responders may have access to rough,
outdated information on storage facilities of hazardous materials
but may lack up-to-date, detailed information about what kind of
material a particular building contains, even though such
information is known to the operator of an industrial facility. New
data management paradigms are needed that would permit
geographically and administratively distributed GIS repositories to
operate with one another in a more seamless and transparent
fashion.1
Improving the collection of both input and response data during
(rather than only after) a crisis is obviously important for
keeping crisis responders informed during a crisis. In addition,
mining the data after the event would facilitate formulating
improved response plans for future crises by determining which
response measures and mitigation efforts were effective. Such data
sets would be invaluable in validating and improving the quality of
crisis models.
Integration and Interoperability
Integration of information from a variety of sources and
organizations is a fundamental issue facing crisis responders.
Requirements for integrating data are not uniform—the
requirements for speed, completeness, and quality of the
information and the integration among organizations all vary
depending on the phase and location of the crisis. Early in the
response to a crisis, integration must proceed rapidly, often in an
ad hoc fashion. Describing a California Department of Forestry
incident management team that manages large incidents including
fires, floods, and earthquake, Thomas O'Keefe observed at the
workshop that these teams must be able to go anywhere at a
half-hour's notice and must manage the up-to-several-thousand
crisis responders arriving within 24 to 36 hours. Just getting this
number of people to an incident quickly is a major challenge that
represents only the first part of the problem. Integrating them for
optimal performance is much more complex. Integration efforts must
extend both vertically within an organization and horizontally
among organizations—sometimes across a large number of
organizations. Response to a major crisis in the United States, for
in-
1The Open GIS
Consortium, with participation from government and industry, is
working to develop standards for such sharing of geographical
data.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
crisis management
Page 27
stance, involves local, state, and federal governments as well
as private-sector businesses and organizations. A crisis with
international dimensions may be even more complex. Jack Harrald
cited the recent crisis in Rwanda, in which hundreds of
organizations and hundreds of thousands of people were involved.
Indeed, at one point during the Rwanda crisis, each of more than
100 international organizations were producing information that in
many cases was inconsistent.
A number of significant nontechnical barriers impede
implementation of solutions, including organizational resistance to
sharing data or to interoperating, lack of overall system
architectures, security constraints that make information sharing
difficult, and both the absence of applicable standards and
nonadherence to extant standards.2
In addition, workshop participants identified a number of ways
in which research on interoperability and integration could make a
significant contribution to improved crisis management. First,
given the dynamic, rapidly developing nature of crises, improved
techniques for the dynamic discovery of information relevant to a
crisis and for the fusion of information from multiple sources are
important. Central to discovery and fusion of information are
techniques that help determine the accuracy, reliability, or
"quality" of the information that is discovered and processed.
Some key approaches to integrating information and facilitating
interoperability of information systems involve the creation and
management of metadata, the information that describes the format
and content of other information, such as the fields in documents
or annotations of video sequences.
Standardization of the metadata describing the format of the
many databases involved in crisis management systems could be
achieved through agreement on XML DTDs (document type definitions,
which are formal descriptions of what can appear in a document and
how documents are structured),3
and more work should be done in this area. Metadata that describes
the content or important topics covered by information objects and
databases is more difficult to standardize but is a crucial part of
integrating heterogeneous information resources. This type of
2Many other
factors make it difficult to achieve interoperability. See Computer
Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council.
1999. Realizing the Potential of C4I: Fundamental
Challenges. National Academy Press, Washington. D.C., for a
discussion of factors affecting all organizations as well as
special challenges faced in a U.S. military context.
3XML is the
eXtensible Markup Language being developed by the World Wide Web
Consortium.
Page 28
metadata is often expressed using a predefined vocabulary,
represented as a list of categories or more structured forms such
as taxonomies and ontologies. Many taxonomies already exist in
government agencies, and many others are being created. Developing
technology to support the development and merging of taxonomies, as
well as the application of these taxonomies to information objects,
is an important research challenge. As part of these efforts ways
must be found of coping with the evolution of metadata. Another
challenge is to find ways to address heterogeneous standards, much
as systems today must support multiple image or document format
standards.
Although metadata, ontologies, and the like are important tools
for integrating data, further work is needed on approaches to both
system interoperability (ensuring that systems can successfully
exchange data) and semantic interoperability (allowing data arising
from heterogeneous systems to be successfully interpreted),
particularly when data integration must be conducted ad hoc and on
the fly.
The response to a crisis is characterized by the distributed
generation of large amounts of unstructured, multimedia data that
must be acquired, processed, integrated into the current situation
model, and disseminated in real time to be useful to crisis
responders. Technology that automatically captures the context of
each piece of data would significantly increase its value. Even
relatively simple techniques such as automatically geo-locating all
input data elements would be beneficial.
Techniques are needed to filter both incorrect and duplicative
data items and to summarize and automatically convert unstructured
data inputs into progressively more structured forms for subsequent
analysis by both humans and models. Much of the unstructured data
will be in the form of text, so research on text filtering,
summarization, extraction, and event detection will be particularly
relevant. Speech will be another important source of information,
and exploiting it will require research on recognition in noisy
environments, segmentation, and indexing. Video will become
increasingly important, and techniques for video segmentation,
summarization, and indexing will be required. Integrating and
exploiting the rich information content in multiple video sources,
such as might be obtained from crisis responders in the field, are
additional challenges.
Given that crisis management depends on the integration of
information coming from multiple organizations and government
agencies, each of which may have policy constraints regarding
confidentiality, a challenge is to develop techniques that permit
integration for the purpose of crisis management consistent with
maintaining those constraints.
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Data Delivery
One important element of data delivery is ensuring that data
will be available when and where needed. Replication—the
periodic copying and distribution of updated versions of database
contents—is clearly a key component in availability. But
simply replicating data in a safe location outside the region
affected by a crisis is not necessarily effective if the crisis
cuts all communication paths to the replicated data. One obvious
solution is to increase the number of replicas, but determining
what is an optimal design requires understanding the appropriate
trade-offs both in the cost of providing and managing local storage
and in the performance penalty entailed in keeping the replicas
updated and consistent. Data delivery in a crisis situation is an
example of the issue that David Maier pointed to in his discussion
of limitations of today's database systems (see "Databases" in
Chapter 2)—the need for database systems that include data
staging and movement rather than just serving as repositories.
The delivery of large amounts of information in real time or
near-real time, for example, video or high-resolution satellite
imagery, is a significant challenge, particularly when existing
infrastructure has been damaged or delivering to mobile units is
required. One option pointed to by workshop participants was the
use of digital direct broadcast satellite services by crisis
response teams deployed in the field. The Defense Advanced Research
Project Agency's (DARPA's) battlefield awareness data dissemination
project was cited as having developed technology that might be
adaptable to the data delivery requirements of crisis response.
Geographical Information System
Performance
An additional area of particular concern noted by workshop
participants was the performance of GISs, which play an
importantrole in crisis management. Participants noted that the
major database system vendors such as Oracle, IBM, Informix, and
NCR are rapidly improving both the functionality and scalability of
the spatial capabilities of their standard database products. Over
the next couple of years it is likely that the majority of large
spatial data sets will reside in commercial database systems and
not in specialized GISs. As managing terabyte-sized spatial data
sets becomes as routine in the future as managing terabyte-sized
commercial data sets is today, database vendors will need to
provide a sufficient level of GIS performance.
Information for People
Like any other human-computer interfaces, crisis management
systems should be developed using good user-centered design
methods,
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including an early focus on users and their tasks; ongoing
empirical measurement and evaluation of systems; iterative design
and testing; and integrated focus on the end-to-end systems, which
considers the larger social context in which they are deployed.
However, crisis management poses a number of unique challenges
(e.g., situations are nonroutine, rapidly changing, often very high
risk, and so forth). Interfaces must be designed so that they can
operate effectively in a high-stress environment, as well as be
intuitive, given that they may be operated by users who have had
only minimal training or who may not have operated a system since
the last crisis—in a crisis, no one can effectively digest a
thick user manual.
Many of the most difficult human-technology interface issues are
evident in the initial response stage of crisis management, but
some occur in the recovery, mitigation, and preparedness phases as
well. (In addition, as discussed below, there are important reasons
to use the same tools and interfaces across all these phases.) The
response phase is characterized by the need to observe, understand,
and integrate a wide range of information sources; communicate and
coordinate among the many different roles of and requirements for
information; and, most important, make rapid decisions.
The following general observations cut across many of the more
specific comments below:
• There is no Moore's law on human perception,
attention, or cognitive and problem-solving capabilities. The
scarce resource in human-computer interfaces is human attention.
The situation is exacerbated in a crisis, because the novelty of
the situation consumes attention that would otherwise be available.
The issue of information overload is discussed further below.
• Crises are nonroutine and complex. Thus they pose
challenges for training and iterative design and evaluation of
systems. In addition, humans resort to well-learned and practiced
behaviors during times of crisis and stress. Creative
problem-solving is difficult under these circumstances.
• Communication and collaboration are critical.
Crises involve a variety of phases, organizations, information
needs, and roles for individuals. Often people who have not worked
closely together are brought together in demanding
circumstances.
• Crisis responders are best able to make effective use
of tools that they also use routinely. Priority should be given
to developing tools and interfaces that are useful in both routine
and crisis situations. For example, most users today are familiar
with the Web browser user interface.
• Decision making is key. People in all roles need
to organize, abstract,
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and share information rapidly and flexibly in support of
effective direction and coordination of crisis response
activities.
Presenting and Using Information
Crisis responders need to get information quickly and flexibly.
Today's interfaces often exacerbate this problem by relying on a
limited set of input and output capabilities. Researchers should
continue to push the hardware and software envelope to support new
interaction styles (e.g., richer visualization, perceptual user
interfaces, multimodal input, support for a range of motor and
language capabilities) to eliminate this impedance mismatch.
Advances are required at the cognitive level as well, where
people's rich but fallible memories and vast amounts of general and
domain-specific knowledge often do not match well with the
information required by computer decision support systems. A richer
range of interaction styles is also important to match the user's
environment. For someone who is driving a vehicle, for example, an
audio interface may be more appropriate than a screen display. At
the forefront of all design improvements should be the goal of
better leveraging and augmenting of natural human capabilities.
Information presentation must be flexible. People need to
extract relevant information rapidly, but which information is
relevant varies across individuals and at different phases of
crisis management. Not all the data collected during a crisis needs
to be disseminated to all the various decision makers during the
crisis (although capture of all the information may be invaluable
later for analysis and training purposes). Some crisis responders
need to get the "big picture," others need to abstract and
integrate information, and others need access to finer and finer
details. User interfaces that support integration of information
with easily configurable "views" are needed. One approach might be
to define a set of well-tailored products aimed at predefined
crisis responder ''customer models" that then can also be fully
customized by the user. Developing improved systems requires a
better understanding of user requirements, information presentation
techniques, information access strategies, and the development of
flexible and modular architectures for information selection and
presentation.
Supporting Effective Communications
and Coordination
In crisis management situations, crisis responders are quickly
brought together, both physically and virtually. Multiple existing
infrastructures, bureaucracies, and individuals are quickly
assembled into a virtual team. People need to quickly develop
community and working relationships. A
Page 32
hybrid of centralized and decentralized approaches to
controlling and managing information resources is required.
Communications of all forms (one-to-one, one-to-many,
many-to-one, and many-to-many) must be supported. Interactions will
take place among crisis responders and between crisis responders
and citizens. People need to speak the "same language" (or find
ways of translating among languages)—a challenge that
encompasses both multilingual issues (e.g., facility in 27
different languages was required in a recent California crisis) and
semantic mismatches (which are more difficult to detect).
Situational awareness provides an important background channel
of activity (e.g., the command center "hubbub") and must be
maintained in electronic environments. Situational action depends
critically on having a good sense of the overall state of events.
In addition, a common understanding of the general state of affairs
gives all decision makers better information for making necessary
trade-offs.
Supporting Effective Real-Time
Decision Making Under Uncertainty and Stress
Crisis situations are characterized by rich, rapidly changing
information flows and by tremendous uncertainty. People in
stressful situations and conditions of information overload tend to
resort to ineffective decision-making strategies. Simply providing
access to information is not enough to support decision makers.
Much more effective systems are required for helping crisis
responders evaluate, filter, and integrate information. As one
workshop participant put it, in a crisis, support must be provided
to overwhelmed and distracted individuals who are, for example,
less able to take on new projects or use new information
technologies. This situation is different from more routine
circumstances in which the traditional rule-based systems for
decision support operate. Simulations and preparedness drills help
in many ways, but training for unpredictable events is a difficult
challenge. Current interfaces also do not typically provide support
for quickly prioritizing tasks (though such tools have been
developed in some fields such as medicine).
Several measures can be taken to help mitigate these design
challenges. Increased automation was one approach suggested to
compensate for decreased capabilities and to reduce stress level.
Mixed-initiative systems, which combine features of directly
manipulable and agent-based systems, could also support more
effective decision making in crisis situations. Systems could be
asked to monitor important situations and highlight changes that
signify problems. Systems could also suggest courses of actions
based on the situation. For example, automatic triggers in a
Page 33
disaster where many people are displaced from their homes could
suggest to an emergency manager what resources (e.g., blankets or
cots) might be necessary. Better methods for users to interact with
agents and more effective tools for automated reasoning would help.
The utility of such systems will be enhanced if they incorporate
emergency management current plans and the underlying assumptions.
For example, if a plan has crisis responders entering a
flood-stricken area to evacuate residents, a system designed to
know planned entry and exit routes could provide an automated early
warning if the plan becomes infeasible because a bridge along the
route has failed.
Another approach to coping with the needs of users under stress
is to improve the ease of use of systems through a better
understanding of the varied needs and capabilities of users. For
example, systems that can monitor a user's performance would allow
systems to adapt in real time to the changing capabilities of users
under stress.
Another area to explore is development of stress filters for the
audio, visual, and textual (i.e., e-mail) information that is
provided to crisis responders. For instance, one of the major
problems during crisis response is the transfer of stress among the
responders, a self-compounding problem akin to what happens in a
noisy restaurant when customers speak louder in an attempt to make
themselves heard. Systems that detect and defuse such stressful
spirals would be useful
Another issue important to effective decision making is
understanding the uncertainty in presented information. Although
people realize at an intellectual level that information, whether
based on field reports or the output of a simulation, may be
uncertain, there are few external aids to reinforce this. Displays
tend to show crisp and clear boundaries, report numbers to several
places of accuracy, and so on. Information presentation techniques
that better represent the inherent uncertainty would facilitate a
direct, intuitive, and more accurate understanding of the state of
knowledge.
Handling Information Overload
The process of collecting, organizing, and disseminating
information during the course of a crisis is time consuming. A
single person in a command post may need to listen to and integrate
information from dozens of people in the field to get a complete
picture of what is happening during a disaster. Disaster situations
force emergency managers to contend with 100 to 1,000 times the
normal number of variables, and the impacts of this stress level
should not be underestimated. The scale of information collection
and dissemination during a significant emergency is vast. In a
Santa Ana fire, for example, 15,000 radio transmissions might
Page 34
occur in a day. Person-to-person, verbal communications cannot
cope with this sort of information traffic volume, and no one can
keep track of the entire picture. Workshop participants suggested
that innovations in speech recognition technology may be helpful in
meeting this challenge. In addition, other computing and
communications technologies are being developed that can help
identify, retrieve, filter, prioritize, and integrate diverse
sources of information to support a wide range of decision makers.
Some users will need access to details and others will need a
higher-level picture of a given situation. Systems that provide
situational awareness and a shared view of the information can help
in communicating with others.
Overcoming Language and Other Barriers
to Communication
During routine and emergency incidents, 911 emergency operators,
as well as firefighters, paramedics, and law enforcement officers,
must deal with people who speak languages other than English.
Language barriers are, of course, also a factor in military
operations. Workshop participants pointed to the potential
represented by the DARPA multilingual interview system developed
for use in Bosnia (described in more detail in Box 3.1) in helping
crisis responders communicate with citizens not fluent in English.
Participants observed that this device's potential benefit for the
delivery of public safety services could be large. Potentially,
PC-based versions could be placed in every law enforcement, fire,
and emergency medical dispatch center in the nation. A wearable
version might be widely used by the fire service, paramedics, law
enforcement agencies, correctional facilities, and hospitals. It
would also be useful to build translator systems to cope with other
communications barriers between crisis responders and citizens.
Devices could be built to facilitate field communications with the
hearing and speech impaired as well.
Warning Citizens at Risk
Early warning systems have been developed for many hazards,
including earthquakes, tornadoes, nuclear plant accidents, and
tsunamis. In the case of earthquakes, even a few seconds' warning
can be useful. This was the case, for instance, following the Loma
Prieta earthquake. Rescue workers were able to receive a few
seconds' notice of an aftershock, giving them a chance to move to a
safer location. Warning systems also play an important role in
flash floods. In that case, there have been significant advances in
detection but less progress in the dissemination of information
from the detection systems and in the response to the warnings.
Page 35
BOX 3.1 Fielding a Multilingual Interview
System
One new technology developed by the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency (DARPA) that has been rapidly translated into a
fielded product is the Multilingual Interview System. The basic
technology is simple, consisting of a speech recognition system
that recognizes which of a set of 200 or 300 phrases has been
uttered, consults an index, and pulls out a CD recording of that
phrase spoken in another language. The system enables the user to
get yes-or-no answers to basic questions, as well as directions
using maps. Such devices must be designed to be portable and easy
to update. To construct a prototype, DARPA packaged this system
into a laptop device with a power supply and other components. The
system has been provided in this form to users in the field in
Bosnia, where it has aided In such activities as interviewing
Bosnians about the locations of mine fields.
A hand-held version is being developed by DARPA that could be
placed in a coat pocket. Those who have used this technology have
been very interested in its possible applications, and there
appears to be a potentially strong commercial market, according to
workshop participant Ronald Larsen.
In all crises, providing up-to-date information to large
segments of the public is important because it permits them to take
appropriate actions, helps prevent panic, can speed remediation
efforts, and can prevent follow-on crises. Widespread broadcasts
are not necessarily the best approach—they can provide only
limited situation-specific information and cannot provide details
tailored to the needs of individuals, such as what evacuation route
to use. Also, broadcast warnings are not well suited to disasters
that have limited geographical impact. False alarms have the effect
of decreasing the attention people give to warnings.
New technologies like "call by location" and zoned alert
broadcasts could help by providing more focused (and presumably
more accurate) warnings, and more detailed advice on what actions
to take. One approach identified as worthy of further investigation
is what is known as a reverse 911 system, whereby the usual
direction of interaction between citizens and emergency managers is
reversed. In a crisis such as a fire or flash flood, such a system
could automatically call all the households and businesses that
might be affected, warn them of the impending danger, and instruct
them on what evasive action should be taken.
The approach can be extended beyond simply making calls over
wireline telephones. For instance, the Federal Communications
Commission has mandated that cell phone systems be capable of
providing accurate information on location. One could envision
exploiting this capability to include automatic dissemination of
information to cell phone users
Page 37
tems as well as video and audio; tools to create and manage
metadata; ontologies and indexing capabilities to support access
and retrieval; delivery mechanisms to share previously captured
experiences, including near-real-time availability to permit use of
prior knowledge during the course of a crisis; and capabilities for
adding commentary to captured information and conducting
after-the-fact analysis. In addition, the capturing of such
information in computational models—allowing computer systems
to reason based on the collected knowledge—could be useful for
both training and operational applications.
In collecting audit trails, it is important to capture not only
the actual state of events at a given time but also when and where
information was received. For example, a fire might have jumped a
firebreak at 0130, but this fact might not have been detected until
0150, and the information might not have reached the headquarters
for the area until 0205. Because one of the goals of collecting
audit trails is to test the effectiveness of different
communication and information management strategies, it must be
possible to reconstruct "flows" of information and determine where
information bottlenecks or loss occurred or where delays or error
were introduced.
Workshop participants also noted that process and workflow
techniques could be applied to the response phase of crisis
management so as to find ways of capturing and representing "best
practices." Of particular interest was finding a way of sharing
these practices across administrative domains, which requires
finding ways of translating organization-specific practices into
practices that are applicable to a broader set of
organizations.
Another critical means of supporting crisis managers is to
provide them with just-in-time training and help. The rudimentary
technologies available today for providing such assistance, such as
context-sensitive help mechanism, are inadequate, and research here
would be helpful.
Using Wearable Computing
Participants identified some opportunities that development of
low-cost, high-performance "wearable" systems incorporating GIS
capabilities might offer. Such systems, which would be designed to
be usable by untrained experts in the field, would operate using
wireless communications (either terrestrially based or via
satellite as such capabilities are deployed; see "Wireless
Communications" in Chapter 2) as well as in a disconnected or only
occasionally connected mode. They would need to be capable of
storing, manipulating, and displaying both standard spatial
features (e.g., roads and rivers) and transmitting and receiving
real-time imagery, voice, and video.
Page 38
One can envision a firefighter's assistant for fighting forest
and brush fires. In a wearable form with voice recognition software
for hands-off operation, such a computer could provide critical
pieces of information such as wind speed, fire boundaries, and
temperatures in a visual display format. Equipped with
high-precision Global Positioning System receivers, the wearable
device could also provide responders with situational awareness
about each firefighter.
Workshop participants also suggested that wearable computers
would be of considerable value in urban search-and-rescue
operations, such as the operation mounted in response to the
Oklahoma City bombing. Such tasks could be assisted by the advent
of tools that allow crisis responders to use, update, and refine
maps on the fly during a rescue. One might, for instance, provide
each rescue worker with detailed information, such as building
blueprints, on the environment they are working in. An important
caveat is that search and rescue personnel may be reluctant to
overly depend on information of uncertain accuracy provided by such
a system when they are working in an unstable, dangerous building
environment. Thus, wearable computers might be more imnmediately
applied to capture of critical information from the field rather
than delivery of information to rescuers.
Information Infrastructure
As discussed above, crisis management is an information and
communication-intensive activity. Information infrastructure is key
to all aspects of crisis management. In preparedness efforts,
networks are used to provide training and conduct virtual
exercises. In crisis response, networks support information
interchange among crisis responders and the provision of warnings
and other information to citizens and after the disaster strikes
are used to register claims for disaster relief funds. The global
disaster information network, GDIN,5 for example, is a concept for an
activity to provide access to disaster information resources,
produce integrated information products, and deliver information to
decision makers.
5The Disaster
Information Task Force, responding to a request from Vice President
Gore, articulated the GDIN concept in its report Harnessing
Information and Technology for Disaster Management—The Global
Disaster Information Network (Disaster Information Task Force.
1997. Washington, D.C.). At the request of the transition team
considering issues related to implementation of a disaster
information network, the National Research Council issued a report
on how such a network could best provide information for decision
makers. See National Research Council. 1999. Reducing Disaster
Losses Through Better Information. National Academy Press,
Washington, D.C.
Page 39
Robustness
Meeting the information requirements of crisis management
depends on a communications infrastructure that is robust in the
face of damage, particularly as greater reliance is placed on
information technology to cope with crises and their aftermath.
Whereas for some applications infrastructure can be brought in from
outside the disaster area (as in mobile GIS systems or satellite
terminals to provide commander centers with communications), in a
number of other cases crisis response would benefit from a more
survivable infrastructure. Two examples of such applications are
tele-registration for disaster victims and the coordination of
crisis response activities among a large number of actors (see
Boxes 1.2 and 1.3 in Chapter 1).
A second, related requirement for communications infrastructure
is the ability to adapt to changing demands, manage traffic
congestion, and permit priority overrides for emergency usage. In a
crisis, loading characteristics may diverge from normal patterns
and exceed normal loads—at just the time when large portions
of the infrastructure may have suffered physical damage. These
scaling and robustness questions arise in a number of large
networks that are key to public safety, such as air traffic
control; police, fire, and safety communications networks; and 911
and other emergency dispatch systems. These issues also arise in
efforts to leverage the public Internet and private networks built
using Internet technologies.
Several networking research questions arise from these
requirements. Networks that are self-adaptive, would, for example,
be able to rapidly configure and assemble themselves as, for
example, wireless infrastructure elements deployed in response to a
crisis. Also, networks that can reconfigure themselves quickly in
response to the effects of damage and changes in demand will be of
much greater utility. Infrastructure that is able to degrade
gracefully as components of the infrastructure are affected by a
crisis would be less likely to completely fail in a crisis
situation.
By their nature, crises result in a change in the normal demands
for communications. There is likely to be more traffic, as well as
traffic of varying priorities. A research question that addresses
this requirement is how to build networks that allow applications
to interact with the infrastructure so as to allow the
incorporation of capabilities such as priority override features or
the recognition and management of information surges during a
crisis. Also, because of the need to maximize a crisis responder's
ability to utilize communications resources, it would be useful to
develop interfaces that allow the combined use of both private and
public infrastructure during a crisis, permitting crisis responders
to exploit whatever infrastructure elements are available in the
aftermath of a
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crisis. Finally, efforts cannot be directed solely at improving
the infrastructure. Work needs to be done at the applications level
to ensure that applications themselves are able to cope with
less-than-optimal network performance. Applications intended for
use in crisis situations cannot assume that large amounts of
bandwidth will be available or that connectivity will be available
on a consistent basis. Strategies for coping would include adapting
the frequency of updates to the available bandwidth or falling back
to activities that consume less bandwidth (e.g., transmitting text
instead of multimedia data).
Infrastructure for Citizens
Workshop participants also noted that if the communications
infrastructure is to be available widely, especially for use in
interacting with individual citizens, then low-cost, ubiquitous
access is required. A range of new capabilities might be enabled
through the use of the Internet, particularly high-capacity,
always-connected access (as opposed to low-speed, dial-up
connections, which require an action to be taken by the user every
time any Internet connection is desired). Participants noted that
these always-connected, broadband services, such as those offered
by cable modem and DSL technologies, are only available to a small
fraction of the U.S. population today. Complex technical, economic,
and policy issues surround the provision of broadband Internet
access to residences,6 but
deployment via a variety of technologies is proceeding, and it is
useful to explore how such capabilities might be used for crisis
management.
In addition to enabling improved ability to interact with
citizens, such as the opportunities discussed above for providing
enhanced or focused warnings, deployment of these new high-capacity
data services to the home offers some interesting opportunities for
determining the impact of a disaster. As communications links to
the home are upgraded to two-way technologies, with the deployment
of two-way-capable cable systems or deployment of fiber to the
curb, a large number of small, fully networkable devices will be
deployed throughout populated areas. Interesting opportunities
arise if one considers placing sensors in each of these boxes. For
example, in a region prone to earthquakes, a cheap accelerometer
(e.g., of the sort used to trigger air bags) might be included in
each box. One possible use of such information is to validate and
refine the predictions of damage models following an earthquake
(see below). After an earthquake, in the areas badly affected, the
sensors (or network nodes)
6The Computer
Science and Telecommunications Board will be initiating a study of
these issues in 1999.
Page 41
would cease to function, while those located outside that
central region would provide indications of the shake intensity.
Polling these devices after the quake could yield almost
immediately, two sorts of information: a map of where the
communications infrastructure had failed and a rough map of shake
intensities in the surrounding areas.
Modeling and Simulation
Role of Modeling and Simulation
Models are physical or mathematical representations of a system,
entity, phenomenon, or process. Simulation is a method for
implementing a model over time. Modeling and simulation can be
applied to numerous phenomena—such as hurricane track and
intensity, earthquake damage, and the airborne dispersion of
chemicals following an accidental release—and they play
important roles throughout crisis management activities.7 Some of these roles are listed
below:
• Planning. Models are used before disasters to help
in planning. For example, the threat of a Hayward fault quake is
troubling because it could be expected to have effects similar to
those of the 1994 Kobe, Japan, quake, in which some 5,000 people
died. The San Francisco Bay area traffic problems following a major
quake would be very bad, and the area could be expected to be split
and paralyzed. Insights gleaned from modeling and simulation can be
used to establish traffic routing contingency plans for such
disasters.
• Mitigation. Models showing potential flood risk,
for example, assist mitigation efforts by allowing the
identification of economic incentives for implementing changes and
by serving as tools for educating communities about the risks they
face.
• Prediction of damage before a disaster. The
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), for example, makes use
of predictive models of the paths of hurricanes, based on
information from the National Hurricane Center, and plots outs
factors such as potential damage to mobile homes and numbers of
hospitals in the area, in order to make resources available in
advance. Some models that predict specific amounts of dam-
7Modeling and
simulation are important in many other domains as well. For an
exploration of areas of common interest to the Department of
Defense and the entertainment industry, see Computer Science and
Telecommunications Board, National Research Council. 1997.
Modeling and Simulation: Linking Entertainment and Defense.
National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.
Page 42
age have not been as well validated—most are derived from
Cold War era nuclear blast damage data—and thus are not relied
upon much by crisis responders.
• Initial damage estimates. After an earthquake,
quickly and directly assessing the extent and distribution of
damage is difficult because acquiring and synthesizing damage
reports takes considerable time. The initial damage estimates are
essential for directing response efforts, as well as estimating
requests for federal aid following the disaster. The scale of this
problem is illustrated by the Northridge quake, in which more than
3 million buildings in the Los Angeles area were at risk. With
disasters of this scope, getting a clear view of the extent of the
damage takes time. One type of tool used to assess quake damage
rapidly is a model that indicates what a particular ''shake" means
in terms of damage. The model, which includes building stock
(structure type, age, etc.), critical facilities, and lifelines, as
well as geological information and demographics, predicts the
number of casualties and the need for shelter and hospitals across
the various soil types.
Research Opportunities
Better simulation and modeling capabilities would enhance the
capabilities of crisis managers throughout the phases of a crisis.
Workshop participants identified a number of improvements in the
design and use of models that could be helpful during a crisis:
• Better meeting of the needs of crisis responders.
The output from models is frequently not presented in a way suited
to meeting the real-world information needs of crisis responders.
Models frequently produce results in units not of interest to the
crisis responder. For example, plume models of a chemical spill or
release of radioactive material typically produce maps showing
dispersion in parts per million as a function of time. What a
crisis responder actually needs is something that automatically
translates the concentration of materials into more easily
interpretable categories such as "safe," "hazardous but not life
threatening," or "life threatening" so that appropriate action can
be taken quickly. Closely related is the need to allow nonexperts
to use models. This requires, for example, that technical
parameters of interest to experts tuning a model are separated from
those of interest to decision makers.
• Data collection to support the real-time use and
validation of models. Models have limitations in their
predictive capabilities. For example, even with all the background
data used in earthquake models, being precise about damage
estimates is difficult. In the area affected by the Northridge
earthquake there were more than 100 8-inch water pipes, and
Page 43
yet a damage model of the quake would not be able to predict
which specific pipes would be broken in the quake. Similarly,
building damage models might provide results applicable to a class
of buildings in an area but not to individual structures, and
engineers would still need to be sent into the field after the
earthquake to assess damage to individual homes and buildings.
Incorporation of data in real-time data can significantly improve
the output of models. Integration of data collected during a crisis
would allow both validation of the results of a model against the
actual situation resulting from the crisis and better prediction of
the next stage of the crisis as it evolves. For example, as an
earthquake mitigation measure one might deploy sensors in buildings
that would provide data that could be combined with shake models to
improve the accuracy of damage predictions following an
earthquake.
• Model interoperability. Models tend to be
developed and used in isolation. To more fully exploit the results
of models, techniques should be developed that better allow models
to be accessed and integrated into information systems. In
particular, it would be useful to facilitate such capabilities as
the integration of real-time data with the results of models and
the propagation of results and their uncertainty between different
models. The value of such integration between data and models can
be illustrated using the water-main-break example introduced above.
Improved integration would permit crisis responders to enter data
from field assessments indicating which particular pipes were in
fact damaged and then to recompute a model of the water system to
provide an estimate of water availability, something of obvious
interest in planning firefighting activities. Also, with such
capabilities in place, systems that would permit different crisis
models to be plugged in could be built, allowing comprehensive and
realistic characterization of a variety of different crisis
situations.
One application proposed during the course of workshop
discussions was the use of simulations to enhance the realism of
exercises. One specific aspect would be the incorporation of
realistic levels of stress. Although, of course, a major research
goal is to provide emergency managers with tools to better manage
the large volumes of information (such as numerous reports from the
field) or the coordination of a multitude of field activities,
increased levels of stress are nonetheless an essential element of
crisis management. Providing realistic stress levels, such as
through the simulation of very high information traffic levels,
would greatly enhance the realism and training value of exercises.
Audit trail and similar information captured during crises could be
used to enhance the realism of the pace and nature of simulated
communications traffic.
Page 44
Electronic Commerce
Electronic commerce and related technologies can play the role
of both enabler of and impediment to effective crisis management.
For the purpose of this discussion, electronic commerce (EC)
technologies are defined broadly to include electronic means for
obtaining information on the availability of physical goods,
requesting goods, and paying for those goods; methods for entering
and processing requests for benefits and paying those benefits; and
computer security technologies needed to control the flow of
information or protect information from unauthorized modification.
In crisis response, the logistics function lends itself to the use
of these electronic commerce techniques (even if the supplies are
already in the possession of agencies responding to the crisis and
if no additional funds will change hands).
Problems Caused by the Increased Use
of and Dependence on Electronic Commerce
Although certain aspects of electronic commerce can be helpful
in responding to a crisis, the routine dependence on electronic
commerce can also serve to make recovery harder, unless the
infrastructure supporting such commerce is able to survive the
event that triggered the crisis. In fact, misplaced reliance on
technology could itself trigger the crisis. For example, widespread
power outages are considered crisis situations today, unlike years
ago when there was no dependence on a power grid. In fact, it is
this dependence combined with a concern about the reliability and
correctness of our computer software that has led to concern for
the year 2000 problem and its consequences—a potential crisis
that many people seem to fear more than many natural disasters (see
Appendix B).
Some key EC technologies that are widely depended on include
credit card authorization, which is itself often dependent on the
telephone; automated teller machines; and computer networks. The
principal issue raised in workshop discussions regarding dependence
on electronic commerce was the need to ensure survivability of the
critical infrastructure supporting EC.8 It is important to assess the
reliability and survivability of different parts of the EC
infrastructure in light of different kinds of crises, and, for
those parts not likely to be available, one must not depend on them
for recovery and must be prepared instead to mitigate the effects
of their loss.
8See Computer
Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council.
1999. Trust in Cyberspace. National Academy Press,
Washington, D.C., for a discussion of critical information
infrastructure issues and associated research topics.
Page 45
Benefits of Electronic Commerce in
Crisis Management
Discussion pointed to several possible benefits of EC
technologies in crisis management:
• Information available from EC systems. Some of the
most compelling ideas involved the use of information normally
maintained in EC systems to gauge preparedness, to locate available
resources, and to reduce public anxiety and hoarding. For example,
inventory information from suppliers might be accessed in real time
to find the nearest availability for supplies. In anticipated
crises (for example, from a hurricane where there is plenty of
advance warning), point-of-sale data could be processed to
determine preparedness—as indicated by the rate at which
individuals are purchasing plastic sheeting, plywood, and so forth.
Of course, this kind of access to supplier databases raises
privacy, business, and independence concerns.
• National emergency purchasing directory. Although
ties to the local EC infrastructure can identify local availability
of supplies, resources will likely need to be acquired from outside
the crisis-affected area. An online purchasing directory with
information that will enable finding suitable suppliers who also
have available inventory can significantly speed up the shipment of
needed supplies into the affected area.
• Processing input from many sources. Besides the
direct tie to EC databases, there is an indirect benefit of
electronic commerce that can be exploited. In particular, many of
the technologies developed and used extensively in electronic
commerce can also be applied to other crisis management needs. The
ability to process data from many sources, either through Web pages
or though call centers located outside the affected area, can be
particularly useful.
If such benefits are to be realized during a crisis,
relationships supporting such data exchange must be established in
advance. Further, procedures must be put in place to credential
emergency responders electronically so that the authority of the
various players to make requests or to offer services can be
determined.
Pitfalls of Traditional Electronic
Commerce in Crisis Management
A critical aspect of the infrastructure for EC that will affect
crisis management is management of the trust relationships between
parties, such as the relationships between insurance companies and
those insured, between citizens and relief agencies (citizens must
trust that they are interacting with legitimate representatives of
those agencies), and between
Page 46
contractors and suppliers (who need assurances that they will be
paid for their services or products). One of the differences
between EC as it is normally applied and EC during a crisis is that
relationships will be more transient during a crisis. There will be
new players, and it will be necessary to determine whether they are
authorized players with whom one should do business. In traditional
commerce there may be more time to build a trust relationship. In a
crisis, one must decide quickly whether to honor a request.
Perhaps the most significant pitfall of traditional EC systems
with respect to their application in crisis situations is the
rigidity of the rules regarding authorization of particular
operations. This rigidity has been the best way to limit fraud in
routine use of EC systems. Typically an organization has a single
entity who is able to authorize purchases. In fact, for
governmental agencies, this practice is often legislated. However,
during a crisis, these rigid procedures could lead to delays or
worse consequences.
Some jurisdictions provide for delegated authority in particular
situations, but today's systems for EC are not able to deal with
this "conditional delegated authority." Workshop participants felt
that one of the research goals for EC should be to provide for more
flexible authorization policies that will maintain accountability
yet support delegated authority and other exceptions. Such policies
must be supported by the EC infrastructure as it is applied in the
normal case, so that it will be available when needed. However, the
conditional aspect of the policies will limit certain discretion
from being applied except in the condition of a declared
emergency.
Research Opportunities
Workshop participants considered the following to be key
research opportunities for electronic commerce in crisis
management:
• Development of technologies and standards for escrow
sites where citizens can store important information that they
might need to access in a crisis but that might not be available if
systems within the affected area are inaccessible. This
escrowed data would include medical records, financial data, family
contacts, and other essential records. The escrow technology must
protect the user's privacy, while improving the survivability of
the users personal information.
• Determination of the range of authorization policies
to be applied in emergency electronic commerce situations. One
such policy to be considered is
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conditional delegated authority and mechanisms to allow other
kinds of exceptions.
• Development of a dynamic trust structure to support ad
hoc or instant accreditation of participants with limited authority
and limited powers of delegation. Such arrangements would
greatly facilitate the purchase, for example, of critically needed
supplies.