Decision Support Systems for Emergency Management

During recent years large industrial accidents have revealed the necessity of efficient decision support systems for accident fighting and emergency management. At the same time there is rapid development within information technology resulting in widespread efforts to exploit this technology in the design of such systems. A short review of the state of the art of decision support systems in general has been given revealing common problems, and specific problems concerning decision in emergency management have been stressed. A Framework for analysis and design of decision support systems based on the new technology and utilising a cognitive point of view has been presented. For design it is necessary to structure the great variety of real life work conditions into domains which correspond to design decisions. An appropriate representation of the problem space should reflect the varying span of attention in the part/whole dimension, and the varying level of abstraction in the means/end dimension. A joint Nordic project concerning decision support in emergency management has been taken ad an example of the use of this technique.