Supporting Collaborative Preparation of Emergency Plans.

Effective preparedness for reacting in case of a severe emergency requires that many experts with various backgrounds evaluate the possible scenarios and come up with a single, unified plan which considers all opinions. This is a typical collaborative decision-making scenario, characterized by a process cycle involving modelling the process, defining the objectives of the decision outcome, gathering data, generating options and evaluating them according to the defined objectives. This is a decision-making scenario which requires the participation of various experts, who must evaluate and compare many scenarios. Each expert will have a partial knowledge about where people may be at the time of the emergency and how they will react. In emergency scenarios the geographical information often plays a significant importance, since plans need to consider the geography of the terrain from which the population should be evacuated, the safe areas where the population should be taken to, the ways connecting evacuations, and how the rescue teams can reach the places where the emergency occurred. This work presents a tool that can help a group of experts with various types of expertise, generate, visualize and compare the outcomes of various hypotheses. The paper also presents a real case simulation in the event of a tsunami following an earthquake at a site in northern Chile and the possibilities of evacuating people to safer zones.