REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS FOR A CONTEXT-AWARE MULTI-AGENCY EMERGENCY RESPONSE SYSTEM

Abstract

<p>Society faces many natural and man-made disasters which can have a large impact in terms of deaths, injuries, monetary losses, psychological distress, and economic effects. Society needs to find ways to prevent or reduce the negative impact of these disasters as much as possible. Information systems have been used to assist emergency response to a certain degree in some cases. However, there is still a lack of understanding on how to build an effective emergence response system. To identify the basic requirements of such systems, a grounded theory research method is used for data collection and analysis. Data from firsthand interviews and observations was combined with literature and analyzed to discover several emergent issues and concepts regarding disaster response. The issues and concepts were organized into four categories: i) context-awareness; ii) multi-party relationships; iii) task-based coordination; and iv) information technology support, which together identified the needs of disaster response coordination. Using evidence from the data, these factors were related to one another to develop a framework for context-aware multi-party coordination systems (CAMPCS). This study contributes to the field of emergency management as the framework represents a comprehensive theory for disaster response coordination that can guide future research on emergency management coordination.</p>