Enhancing common situational understanding in natural disaster management
Common operational picture, situational awareness and crisis communication in emergency management
Research highlights the importance of common operational picture (COP), situational awareness (SA) and crisis communication in emergency management. This project concerns how multi-agency emergency management can enhance the COP during natural disasters and build a common situational understanding. An important part of this project will embrace the phenomenon of COP, and address the lack of references on concrete components/categories in different contexts and methodology of how we understand what actually happens concerning the COP from time to time during a response, and moreover; how to get from a COP to common situational understanding.
There are several intended contributions with this project;
Firstly, develop a method for analyzing the emergency organization`s collaborative communication in order to gain a COP, by using audio-logs.
Secondly, contribute by identifying the information needs and critical cues for responding to natural disasters, what needs to be shared, in which context, timeline and by what actors. Thirdly; contribute with identifying the functionalities that are needed for a map based IS to enhance the COP in selected contexts.
However; The project’s main contribution is to provide the Emergency Management Services with a new process of support for both information collection and to enhance the common situational understanding in the preparedness, response and evaluation phase of natural hazards. This is important, because when the rescue personnel are not on the same page, the operation gets complicated and inefficient.