Toward collaborative situational awareness in a time-critical operational environment

In many fields of business, management has to act in situations and environments that require fast decision making based on inadequate information of the situation. In rapidly changing circumstances, an organization's opportunities for maintaining the situational awareness necessary for decision-making become substantially more difficult. In this type of situation, decisions often end up being made based on insufficient or even incorrect information, with potentially catastrophic results. This research is based on the ongoing SSMC/DDKM (Seamless Services and Mobile Connectivity in Distributed Disaster Knowledge Management) project, which has the context of the advanced usage of situational knowledge in connection with disasters and catastrophes. In practice, this type of situation requires close collaboration between different authorities and also the optimized, integrated use of management systems and resources. In this context there are various authorities involved and this time-critical operational environment requires effective and seamless collaboration related to information transmission for all participants. Typically, the authorities have had conventions and systems to compile information for their own needs, but difficulties have been observed in composing a shared situational awareness that includes the information captured from all authorities. In this paper methods and techniques are discussed which could promote the creation of collaborative situational awareness to support the collaboration of authorities in the management of disaster situations.