Adaptive workflow simulation of emergency response

Recent incidents and major training exercises in and outside the Netherlands have persistently shown that not having or not sharing information during emergency response are major sources of emergency response inefficiency and error, and affect incident mitigation outcomes through workflow planning that is based on this information. In this dissertation the grounded development and initial testing of the Adaptive Workflow Simulator (AWS) was presented. The goal of the AWS is to simulate and on the fly provide information about the current state of the workflow, workload and communication load of emergency responders during emergency response situations as a function of the information that is exchanged. As a function of the information flow, the AWS is used to approximate the workflow; approximate the strain put on the emergency responders as a consequence of task execution and handling information, and finally provide a test bed for to assess the impact of information distribution on the workflow. The general research question that was addressed in this dissertation is “How can we build and ground a generic model to on the fly simulate emergency response and adaptively provide information about the workflow, workload and communication load of emergency responders as a function of the information that is exchanged?” In this dissertation this question is answered by: With the use of the Brahms simulation environment (Chapter 3) a grounded (Chapter 2) template of emergency response can be constructed (Chapter 4) that is able to make an approximation of the emergency response workflow (Chapter 5), the workload (Chapter 6) and the communication load (Chapter 7) of the individual emergency responders involved in the emergency response. To test and ground the models included in the AWS, three emergency response exercises were analysed, one past emergency response was modelled, a questionnaire was administered to a group of experts in the field of emergency response and finally, to test the feasibility of the AWS, a proof of concept simulation was conducted that, by using real time communication data. Further research and applications however are needed to determine the robustness of the models used in the AWS.