Abstract

The decisions made by the operation commander in emergency situations should be made quickly to save lives. To avoid late or bad decisions, the commander must construct a situational awareness. The irregular arrival flow of information, uncertainty, information overload and lack of persistence are the main factors that hinder this task. To minimize these effects we propose an architecture composed of mobile devices and a decision support system to be used in the command post. The main point in the system design is the cognitive overload. Therefore, heuristics about the usage of the information by experienced commanders were elicited and implemented. © 2010 IEEE.