Situational awareness and decision-making in a crisis situation: A crisis management cell in virtual reality

Abstract

In a constantly evolving and hyper-connected world, the crises we are facing are changing, exceeding borders, and impacting every sector of activity. More data can be gathered from the crisis site, arriving in a large flow of various types from multiple sources such as sensors, open data, or social media. This huge amount of data coming continuously from the crisis site leads to an ever-changing situational awareness that must be built and understood as quickly as it is evolving to ensure a relevant and effective crisis response. To build a shared situational awareness, decision-makers can gather in a room where they can share and compare the information they receive from the crisis site to build a common operational picture that they can use to make decisions and implement them: this is a crisis management cell. However, the tools in traditional crisis management cells may not be able to keep up with the new requirements induced by these changes: we need modular and dynamic tools able to adapt to the crisis and the needs of the crisis managers while ensuring collaboration and information sharing not only between the stakeholders but also with remote experts that might be needed to understand the situation. We need to start conceiving the future crisis management cell that would meet the new exigencies of crisis management. This paper proposes our version of that future crisis management cell, using virtual reality to provide a dynamic and modular crisis management cell linked to artificial intelligence and decision-support systems.