II-EN: Ensayo II: An Enhanced Virtual Emergency Operation Center (EOC) for Research and Training in Disaster Management

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When disasters occur, they can severely impact the health and disrupt the continuity of communities. Emergency operations centers (EOCs) are temporary organizations that emerge to respond to disasters by bringing together dozens of private and public organizations to communicate, coordinate, and collaborate to ensure the continuity of the community. They have primary responsibility for public safety under the guidelines of the National Incident Management System (NIMS). Yet, EOCs are rarely engaged outside of a disaster situation, so there is little empirical data to provide insight into their processes and performance to support improvements. Observational research on such events is difficult; experimental research is even more difficult. The goal of this infrastructure enhancement project is to further develop an organizational simulation of an EOC, called Ensayo, that reflects a wide variety of EOC forms. The goal of Ensayo is not to model a disaster, but to model the organization that responds to a disaster. The simulation will be based on an initial prototype and developed with the collaboration of the the Miami-Dade Office of Emergency Management and partners in its EOC. Ensayo affords not only a research tool for academics, but also a resource for education, training and policy analysis for communities of practice who engage in an emergency operations event.Ensayo II will be a reformulation and elaboration of the Ensayo infrastructure developed with prior NSF funding, based on experiences with the earlier project. The project has four major goals. First, Ensayo II will evolve the architecture and functionality of Ensayo. Experience with Ensayo has revealed the importance of crossing disciplinary boundaries (cognitive science, human-computer interaction, computer science, organizational science, systems engineering) in order to understand, model, and support the complexities of an emergency management decision-making structure. Second, the system will incorporate new collaboration and communication elements that are now found in EOCs. For example, Miami-Dade was one of the first to formally address and integrate into their structure a business recovery function. Third, the system will support informational and decision modeling and tracking. Entities in an EOC are generally guided by specific rules of communication and authority, both from within and without. Tracking (or simulating) decisions and information flow under various organizational stressors can provide unique predictive and explanatory insights into the social dynamics of EOC structures. Finally, the project will move from a prototype to an enhanced, operational research infrastructure that can be deployed as a core, open-source project. Through Ensayo II's improved infrastructure, researchers can investigate EOC structures in situ and probe the micro-mechanisms that underlie EOC choices impacting business and society.