The incident commander's problem: resource allocation in the context of emergency response

A large-scale emergency response relies on a single decision-maker, the Incident Commander, to spontaneously allocate resources that change continuously in both availability and status, to control and resolve an equally dynamic incident. This exploratory study examines the general form of the Incident Commander's problem, the design and management of a highly temporary organisation deploying resources against a unique and evolving problem. Table-top simulation, long established in the training of decision-makers, is introduced here as a research tool to observe and record the evolution of one such emergency operation. Data from a particular table-top simulation is used in a novel application of social network analysis, which shows great promise in the further study of emergency response. This simulation likewise provided the opportunity to compare two different methodologies of decision support for emergency response, yielding some highly counter-intuitive observations.