Wide-area incident management system on the internet

The incident management process consists of four sequential steps incident detection, response, clearance and recovery. Eeach of these components comprises of a number of operations and coordinated decision making between the agencies involved. The provision of computer based support tools for the personnel involved will help develop appropriate incident management strategies and increase the efficiency and expediency of the entire process. Existing incident management systems are developed on various traditional computing platforms, including UNIX, and Windows. However, with the advent of World Wide Web and Internet based programming tools such as, Java, it is now possible to develop platform independent decision support tools for the incident management agencies. Any agency will be able to use these Web based tools on a computer with a Java enabled browser. Thus, Web based tools offer an invaluable opportunity to develop next generation on-line decision support tools for real-time traffic management. The major objectives of this paper are: 1 . to explore and demonstrate the applicability of WEB based tools for the development of on-line decision support systems for incident management and, to develop and test a prototype incident management Decision Support System (DSS) which has most of the capabilities of similar UNIX based DSS support systems. The paper briefly describes the implementation and development of a prototype Wide-Area Incident Management Support System using WEB based tools. It also describes the implementation architecture and the individual functions of this prototype. 2 . 1. RESEARCH OBJECTIVES AND BACKGROUND The incident management process consists of four sequential steps incident detection, response, clearance and recovery, each of which comprises of a number of operations and coordinated decision making between the agencies involved. The provision of computer based support tools for the personnel involved, will help develop appropriate incident management strategies and increase the efficiency and expediency of the entire process. The major objectives of this paper are to: 1. explore and demonstrate the applicability of WEB based tools to the development of on-line decision support systems for incident management. 2 . develop and test a prototype incident management Decision Support System (DSS) which has most of the capabilities of the UNIX based DSSs such as the WideArea Incident Management Support System (WAIMSS) (Ozbay et al., 1996). The development of incident management support systems has been attracting considerable attention over the past few years. These systems play an important role in aiding decision makers 0-78034778-1 198 $10.00