2. Situation awareness in current disaster response operations
SA is a cognitive construct that refers to an awareness and understanding of external events in our immediate and near future surroundings and is defined as “perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the future” (Endsley and Garland, 2000). A parallel term “context-awareness” is also used in literature to describe a “subset of physical and conceptual states of interest to a particular entity” (Pascoe et al., 1998). Context-aware computing is also an established area of research within computer science, ergonomics and data communication fields. These fields focus on adaption of computer application behavior to user context from several different perspectives.
Researchers and practitioners have considered SA as critical for accurate decision making and performance in a variety of work domains such as air traffic control, general aviation, nuclear power plant management, and medicine and driving. Improved SA could result in better decision making and performance (Endsley and Garland, 2000). Figure 2 highlights the relationship between environment, situation awareness, decision making and performance where “Perception” refers to the basic understanding of important information, “Interpretation” refers to integration of multiple pieces of information and determination of their relevance to person’s goals and “Projection” refers to the ability to forecast future situation events and dynamics. High SA does not always lead to better decisions. Other factors such as strategy, experience, training, personality, organizational and technical constraints also affect the decision making process (Endsley and Garland, 2000).
A key challenge in an effective disaster response operation is to accurately access existing situation, collect accurate and relevant data from disaster scene, and analyze it and transmit it to the right personnel at the right time. Improved SA can have a critical impact on accuracy of the decision making process, resource management, and coordination and response effectiveness. For instance, during 9/11 disaster relief operation, responders did not have adequate information on, nor an overall perspective of, the conditions in the World Trade Centre (WTC) buildings and what was happening elsewhere at the site (Sunder, 2004). Also, inter-agency information sharing was