SACIM

(2010-11) SACIM – Situation Awareness in Critical Incident Management. Financed by FCT (PTDC/EIA/102875/2008). Project coordinator. Participants: FCUL.

Situation awareness is the capability to analyze and understand the evolution of a situation from the ongoing interplay between the occurring events and the actions leveraged to control the situation. Situation awareness combines cognitive functions, such as attention, perception, interpretation and anticipation with the capacity to find plausibility in scattered data, information gaps, missing links and equivocal data sets. Although situation awareness may be analyzed as individual, collective (several individuals working in parallel) and coordinated (several individuals working in a input-process-output type of relationship) processes, this project is fundamentally focused on Collaborative Situation Awareness (CSA). CSA considers a team of mutually dependent people contributing as a whole to construct awareness. The reasons to focus the project on CSA are based on:

  1. Previous studies showing the importance of CSA to explain organizational behavior beyond the traditional rational framework (Weick 99);
  2. Previous studies showing the importance of CSA in the teams’ response to critical incidents (Milis 07);
  3. The research conducted with High Reliability Organizations (HRO) shows that under critical conditions the organizations become more collegial and decision-making tends to become more decentralized and collaborative (Hayes 06);
  4. Recent studies showing the positive effects of attention support with collaborative technology (Ferreira 08);
  5. And finally, the current research gap concerning CSA (Sapateiro 08b).

The specific context where CSA will be studied concerns incident management. Incident management is typically an unstructured emergent process, evolving according to unknown events and conditions (Markus 02). It primarily relies on the tacit knowledge, experience, flexibility, improvisation, decentralization and collaboration of the involved actors. It is also highly reliant on communication, coordination and collaboration among the involved actors (Sapateiro 08c). CSA should therefore be regarded as fundamental support function during incident management. Our preliminary experiments with critical infrastructure management teams revealed that establishing CSA is quite challenging, since the tacit knowledge is evenly distributed among the team members and the explicit knowledge is usually unavailable during and lost after the events (Sapateiro 08a). Nevertheless, CSA was recognized as an important asset in incident management, which lead us to seek further insights on this matter. Although several preliminary evaluation actions have already been conducted, more experiments are necessary to define the conceptual foundations of CSA. Therefore, the primary objective of the project is to conduct further laboratory experiments. The following concrete goals will be achieved by this research:

  1. Propose and validate a CSA model;
  2. Propose an instrument to measure CSA;
  3. Assess the capability of the proposed model to increase shared awareness under critical situations;
  4. Implement the CSA model in a functional prototype, which will be used during the experiments.

Considering the challenges associated to CSA, the model construction and validation will be separated in three subgoals:

  1. Definition of the situation awareness model, organizing information about the occurring critical events and their conditions;
  2. Definition of the situation awareness model, organizing information about the occurring critical events and their conditions;
  3. Definition of the presentation model, responsible for conveying a shared strategic view of the situation;
  4. Definition of the collaboration model, supporting the collaborative construction, distribution and update of CSA.

The expected major outcomes from this project will be:

  1. A theoretical contribution to understand CSA and its role in incident management;
  2. A theoretical contribution to measure CSA;
  3. A CSA prototype; – Rich data, including qualitative and quantitative, obtained from extensive laboratory experiments with the CSA prototype, disentangling the situation awareness, presentation and collaboration issues;
  4. A decisive contribution to improve organizational resilience: the capacity to maintain operations under extreme and critical situations, being flexible, resourceful, sensitive to the unknown, resistant and responsive to incidents and accidents (Kanno 06).

This research project will be conducted in collaboration with two international research teams. One collaboration will be with the team from the University of Chile lead by Profs. Gustavo Zurita and Nelson Baloian, who have been collaborating with the Principal Investigator on the development of mobile groupware. This group will contribute to the project with the NOMAD collaborative platform that will be used to prototype and experiment the CSA model. The second collaboration will be with Prof. David Mendonça, from the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, NJ, USA. David Mendonça is specialized in decision-making under emergency situations and will collaborate on the development and evaluation of the CSA model.

Project’s Documentation

Thesis

Sapateiro, Cláudio Miguel Garcia Loureiro dos Santos (ongoing) Modelos De Colaboração Para Situações De Emergência No Contexto De Organizações Resilientes. Ph.D. Thesis, Supervised by Pedro Antunes, formal co-supervison by Joaquim Filipe (EST-IPS). Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. Informatics Department. Lisbon

Simões, David Alexandre Mendes da Silva (ongoing) Group Construction of Work Models Using Storytelling. Ph.D. Thesis, Supervised by Pedro Antunes. Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon. Informatics Department. Lisbon

Papers (supported by the project)

Antunes, P., V. Herskovic, S.  Ochoa and J. Pino (forthcoming) “Structuring Dimensions for Collaborative Systems Evaluation.” ACM Computing Surveys, to appear. 5-year impact factor: 12.7. This journal is ranked #1 in ISI category Computer Science. http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~paa/papers/acm-cs-2010.pdf

Sapateiro, C., N. Baloian, P. Antunes  and G. Zurita (forthcoming) “Developing a Mobile Collaborative Tool for Business Continuity Management.” Journal of Universal Computer Science, to appear. ISI 5-year impact factor: 0.788.

Antunes, P. and H. Mourão (2011) “Resilient Business Process Management: Framework and Services.” Expert Systems With Applications, 38(2), pp. 1241-1254. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2010.05.017. ISI 5-year impact factor: 3.162. This Journal is ranked #1 in ISI category Operations Research & Management Science.http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~paa/papers/esa-journal-10.pdf

Antunes, P. (2010) “BPM and Exception Handling: Focus on Organizational Resilience.” IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C: Applications and Reviews, doi:10.1109/TSMCC.2010.2062504. ISI 5-year impact factor: 2.342. This Journal is ranked #6 in ISI category Computer Science, Cybernetics.

Antunes , P. and A. Ferreira (2011) Developing Collaboration Awareness Support from a Cognitive Perspective. Proceedings of the 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Hawaii. IEEE Computer Society. CORE A. http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~paa/papers/hicss-11.pdf

Antunes , P. and J. Pino (2010) A Review of CRIWG Research. Groupware: Design, Implementation, and Use. 16th CRIWG Conference on Collaboration and Technology, Maastricht, The Netherlands, vol. 6257, pp. 1-15. Heidelberg, Springer-Verlag. Full paper acceptance ratio: 38%.http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~paa/papers/criwg-10-meta.pdf

Antunes , P., C. Sapateiro, G. Zurita and N. Baloian (2010) Integrating Spatial Data and Decision Models in a E-Planning Tool. Groupware: Design, Implementation, and Use. 16th CRIWG Conference on Collaboration and Technology, Maastricht, The Netherlands, vol. 6257, pp. 97-112. Heidelberg, Springer-Verlag. Full paper acceptance ratio: 38%. http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~paa/papers/criwg-10-geo.pdf

Antunes , P., C. Sapateiro, J. Pino, S. Ochoa and V. Herskovic (2010) Awareness Checklist: Reviewing the Quality of Awareness Support in Mobile Collaborative Applications. Groupware: Design, Implementation, and Use. 16th CRIWG Conference on Collaboration and Technology, Maastricht, The Netherlands, vol. 6257, pp. 202-217. Heidelberg, Springer-Verlag. Full paper acceptance ratio: 38%.http://www.di.fc.ul.pt/~paa/papers/criwg-10-awareness.pdf

Technical Reports

 

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