Crisis management involves the use of command, control, communications, and intelligence information systems to support decision makers in anticipating crises, formulating plans, and executing these plans through coordinated responses. Recent relief efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew and the Los Angeles earthquake are compelling demonstrations of the need for a National Information Infrastructure. While responsible government agencies had developed disaster relief plans in the event of a major disaster, there was not a readily available information infrastructure to communicate the plan, or to coordinate the myriad of relief agencies that flocked to the disaster sites. For example, one conclusion in a post Hurricane Andrew report was the need to have federal information systems that could visually display "areas of need" on electronic maps that could be shared with the broadcast media. The need for such information systems was further demonstrated during the L.A. quake relief efforts.
Now consider the future. Satellite and mobile communications will ensure "anytime, anywhere" reliable communication infrastructure upon which to base an information infrastructure. Crisis management command and control systems can then be designed and readily tailored to meet the needs of the crisis at hand. Weather center models together with continuously interpreted overhead imagery can more accurately predict crisis locations and the degree of damage. More reliable and faster situation assessment will be accomplished through a combination of intelligent agents, image understanding, and language understanding systems that will assess and aggregate information from a diverse set of situation reports (telephone, radios, etc. ). Decision-aiding models and "lessons learned" histories from similar past crises will aid in refining crisis plans, predicting resource needs, and defining precedent constraints for achieving those needs. For example, in the context of a serious earthquake where heavy cranes are required to help remove building debris, such a service may remind the crisis planners to plan for the insertion of portable power units (the failure to do this in the recent Mexican earthquake resulted in a loss of many lives).
Rapidly assembled response teams, consisting of Federal, state, and volunteer organizations, will be able to share and update electronic plans, collaborate during the execution of the plan, and use that plan as a basis for real-time training. Crisis planners would also be able to "collaborate through time" by comparing planned actions with historically relevant plans and through advanced simulation services. The underlying services that are needed include: collaboration and interaction, intelligent agents to monitor communications and provide relevant summaries and advisories, "plug and play" and easily tailorable decision aids, interoperable maps and other electronic communications media, simulation services to predict the effectiveness of the crisis response plan, and access and navigation through historical libraries.