Wide-area incident management system on the Internet

The incident management process consists of four sequential steps-incident detection, response, clearance and recovery. Each of these components comprises of a number of operations and coordinated decision-making between the agencies involved. The provision of computer based support tools for the personnel involved will help develop appropriate strategies and increase efficiency and expediency. Existing systems are developed on various traditional computing platforms. However, with the advent of World Wide Web and Internet based programming tools such as Java, it is now possible to develop platform independent decision support tools for the incident management agencies. Any agency will be able to use these Web based tools on a computer with a Java enabled browser. Thus, Web based tools offer an invaluable opportunity to develop next generation online decision support tools for real-time traffic management. The major objectives of this paper are: 1. to explore and demonstrate the applicability of Web-based tools for the development of online decision support systems for incident management and, 2. to develop and test a prototype incident management decision support system (DSS) which has most of the capabilities of similar UNIX based DSS. The paper briefly describes the implementation and development of a prototype wide-area incident management support system using Web-based tools. It also describes the implementation architecture and the individual functions of this prototype.