A flexible architecture for selection and visualization of information in emergency situations
Bruno Nascimento, Adriana Santarosa Vivacqua, Marcos R. S. Borges · 2016
Emergency command and control centers (CC) are integrated facilities to assist and handle crisis situations. In these CCs, operators suffer both with information shortage and overload. This paper focuses on the information overload problem. Operators often do not have adequate access to information that may be relevant in the decision-making process. In many CC centers, information is stored without filtering or refinement for later use, and its visualization is pre-defined at design time, offering no possibility of customization. To address the problems created by this lack of support, we propose an architecture to enable fast and easy selection from multiple information sources, and definition of appropriate visualizations. Following this architecture, we developed the “Emergency Dashboard”, a system that provides selection of a desired set of data and presents it, using configurable dashboards. We also provide collaborative mechanisms, given that, at times, it is not possible for a single user to handle such large datasets alone.