Projects: EMERRS

EMERRS

Emergency Regional Response Systems
Integrated Decision-Support Capability for Enhancing Crisis Management and Increasing Response

EMERRS is an evolving collection of decision-support applications designed to assist urban response units in dealing with a wide range of crisis management situations. As a set of collaborative tools that monitor the urban environment and provide enhanced near real-time situational awareness to emergency response commanders and their staff, EMERRS integrates data from disparate sources into a single coherent view that provides a disciplined decision-making environment. In this manner, EMERRS frees the crisis management staff from time-consuming and tedious data filtering tasks, allowing more time for higher-level situational assessment and rapid response to changing events.

The EMERRS approach to system design incorporates collaborative agents with knowledge in specific domains. In order to respond to changing circumstances, agents send alerts, inferences, and recommendations to response personnel. Agents are used to gather and reveal information so that the user can have access to the most accurate and up-to-date information.

The objective of EMERRS is to accelerate the decision-making process and provide continuous support during the various stages of a crisis response situation. At every point in the decision-making process, agents monitor and contribute solution strategies within their areas of knowledge. Although user requests for assistance are supported, the system does not wait for such requests to offer contributions. Therefore, EMERRS provides a decision-support environment in which agents and human users, with very different but complementary capabilities, interact to solve problems collaboratively.