conflicting information on the cross-organizational level or even cross-team level. For example, different organizations perceive the same activityin different states (e.g. the police thinks that the activity “Build Dam”has failed while the fire fighters arestill executing this activity).This leads to conflicts which needto be resolved and system support can be helpful for that(e.g. by defining governance mechanisms to resolve these conflicts)

s of now, we have been discussing the model with one senior (i.e. professor) and one junior organizational scientistspecialized in firefighting proceduresby providing an animated version of our model. Thus, the terminology we used for describing concepts (e.g. activity) is in line with the terminology of organizational scientists. Out of our discussions, they have evaluated our model from an end user perspective.They confirmed that the model from an activity and dependency level can be useful for first responders

Example for Execution of Activities

We do not describe the technical details of the execution mechanism here, because this is not the scope of this paper

Visualization: Each user can visualize the activities and their dependencies differently, e.g. by providing a map of activities or an activity matrix.

An activity type isdescribed as: 

The role “accountable” is allowed to change the state from “Plan” to “Execute”. The role”responsible” is allowed to change the state from “Execute” to “Finish”

Currently, we have not identified much research on how these kinds of dependencies can be supported by a crisis response activity management system.

There is also a need for defining clear accountability and responsibility (i.e. governance) for each activity. For example, the police chief is accountable for the activity “Evacuation of Residential area”, but the police field team is responsible for its execution. There are dependencies between activities illustrated as dotted lines

There arethree different organizations responding to the flood

However it can become very difficult to describe a situation in a textual way in a logic languag

Models thus become difficult to manage, in particular for unexpected events

ittle has been published in the area of coordinating disaster response activities. The problem is related to the sense-making problem: Who is doing what and how is it related to the own activities.

Several interviews and workshops have been conducted to investigate integrated information technology support for crisis response management in the SoKNOS project(SoKNOS 2009)

ad-hocactivity management system

technicalsupport for temporal coordination of these activities by a system

ense-making

hese plans can be challenged by the dimensionof the event, by its unexpected consequences and by the appearance of related or unrelated new events