Intelligent Agent Incident Command System

Within hazard and disaster response and recovery management, the National Incident Management System (NIMS) has become the dominant organizational model for incident response. The Incident Command System (ICS) provides report and operational templates that structure activities and resources during an incident or event. In an emergency situation, information can be sometimes contradictory and may even not be "clean". In order to maintain the situational awareness of the command officer, the system should be able to adapt by taking into account the type of information available, the specific task at hand, and knowledge derived from the information integration agent. It is important to develop the models of operator function through methods such as OFM (operator function model) to understand what an operator would do or expect to do and what type of information would aid them in improved decision making.

This project will develop a model-based system to support ICS commanders to minimize cognitive load on decision makers, exploit semantic relationships in reports and sensor data to advise of otherwise invisible occurrences, and sequence the actions of ground-level assets to refine causal relationship models to better reflect ongoing developments during crisis and/or event management. The agent-based simulation architecture will demonstrate of the effectiveness of information presentation and transparency in situations where agents can support and enhance human decision-making without increasing the cognitive workload of the human.

Researchers:

SUBHASHINI GANAPATHY is an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical, Industrial and Human Factors Engineering at Wright State University. Her research work spans core areas of mobile computing, decision-making, user-experience, and human factors engineering.

MICHELLE CHEATHAM is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Wright State University. Her research work is focused on semantic data integration, including ontology modeling and alignment, and the privacy concerns of Big Data.

JOHN GALLAGHER is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Wright State University. His research work is focused on neuromorphic computation, cyber physical systems, and self-repairing micro robots.

JAMES GRUENBERG is the Deputy Director of the National Center for Medical Readiness at Wright State University's Wright State Research Institute. His career path has provided over thirty years in local, state, and federal emergency and disaster response.

JACK SMITH is the Associate Director at the National Center for Medical Readiness at Wright State University where he is responsible for the development of all training, education, and consulting programs related to Emergency/Disaster Management, First Responders, and healthcare institutions. He also serves as the Executive Director for the Ohio Mortuary Operations Response Team.