Messaging Model for Emergency Communication

During an emergency, the on-scene communication takes place in the form of dispatch-mediated emergency messages. These messages, identified from the emergency communication reports, follow no standardized format, which render them useless for several other departments. This paper develops a messaging model, compliant with UCORE messaging framework, as follows: First, it determines the structure of the emergency messages. Second, it translates the emergency messages to a standardized format

An Activity Theory Approach to Leak Detection and Mitigation in Personal Health Information (PHI)

The migration to Electronic Health Records (EHR) has raised issues with respect to security and privacy. One such issue that has become a concern for the healthcare providers, insurance companies and pharmacies is Patient Health Information (PHI) leak. Borrowing from Document Control Domain (DCD) literature, in this paper, we develop a methodology for detection and mitigation of PHI leaks by employing Activity Theory to elucidate the complex activities in the transitive workflow

Design Principles for Emergency Collaborative Systems: A Situation Awareness Study of Buffalo Plane Crash

Due to differences in governance structure, training, applicable polices, legal requirements and culture, the nature of operations vary based on agency, county, population, leadership, etc. This leads to serious challenges during multi-agency response to emergencies. The different agencies are required to work together to effectively and efficiently respond to an emergency incident. The paper contributes to research in areas of inter-agency collaboration and emergency management. With the help of case study, this paper aims to explore factors that impact inter-agency collaboration to generate design principles that are useful to designing better systems to mitigate critical incidents. In addition, with the help of interviews with four experts (two fire chiefs and two dispatchers) and raw incident communication reports, we identify system, communication, information, and interoperability issues

Infastructure Interdependencies Modeling and Analysis - A Review and Synthesis

The events of 9/11 and the occurrence of major natural disasters in recent years has resulted in increased awareness and renewed desire to protect critical infrastructure that are the pillars to maintaining what has become normal life in our economy. The problem has been compounded because the increased connectedness between the various sectors of the economy has resulted in interdependencies that allow for problems and issues with one infrastructure to affect other infrastructures. This area is now being investigated extensively after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) prioritized this issue. There is now a vast extant of literature in the area of infrastructure interdependencies and the modeling of it. This paper presents a synthesis and survey of the literature in the area of infrastructure interdependency modeling methods and proposes a framework for classification of these studies. The framework classifies infrastructure interdependency modeling and analysis methods into four quadrants in terms of system complexities and risks. The directions of future research are also discussed in this paper