Dynamic Decision Support for Emergency

To enhance support of emergency response decision making, we are investigating decision aids that use simulation models to predict the range of plausible consequences of each potential course of action. Due to the rapid pace of emergency operations, the user interface displaying the models' results needs to facilitate quick understanding of a changing landscape of possible futures. This paper describes a user test aimed at (1) determining whether a model-driven visualization was useful and (2) confirming the validity of a principled design approach for developing decision-making test situations. Two groups of participants received identical textual descriptions of situations and were asked to decide the number of emergency response vehicles to dispatch. One group also saw a visual depiction of model results. The decision-aided group's decisions were closer to the normatively correct decisions and this group's confidence was higher. Further, the decision-aided group rated the degree of decision support higher. The decision times for each of the four types of test situations differed significantly from each other, re-validating our method of developing test situations.