Demands to and experience with the decision support system RODOS for off-site emergency management in the decision making process in Germany

Emergency situations, man-made as well as natural, can differ considerably. However, they share the characteristic of sudden onset, involve complex decisions and necessitate a coherent and effective emergency management. In the event of a nuclear or radiological accident in Europe, the real-time on-line decision support system RODOS provides support from the early phase through to the medium and long-term phases. This paper describes the demands to a Decision Support System from a user-centred view as well as experiences gained from conducting moderated decision making workshops based on a hypothetical accident scenario focusing on the evaluation of long-term countermeasures using the simulation capabilities of the RODOS system and its recently integrated evaluation component Web-HIPRE, a tool for multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA).