Turoff et al. Dynamic Decision Making for Extreme Events Dynamic Emergency Response Management for Large Scale Decision Making in Extreme Events* Murray Turoff turoff@njit.edu Connie White connie.m.white@gmail.com Linda Plotnick linda.plotnick@gmail.com Starr Roxanne Hiltz hiltz@njit.edu Information Systems Department New Jersey Institute of Technology "That's what makes us a great country. The little things are serious and the big ones are not" – Will Rogers ABSTRACT Effective management of a large-scale extreme event requires a system that can quickly adapt to changing needs of the users. There is a critical need for fast decision-making within the time constraints of an ongoing emergency. Extreme events are volatile, change rapidly, and can have unpredictable outcomes. Large, not predetermined groups of experts and decision makers need a system to prepare for a response to a situation never experienced before and to collaborate to respond to the actual event. Extreme events easily require a hundred or more independent agencies and organizations to be involved which usually results in two or more times the number of individuals. To accomplish the above objectives we present a philosophical view of decision support for Emergency Preparedness and Management that has not previously been made explicit in this domain and describe a number of the current research efforts at NJIT that fit into this framework. * This paper is based upon an invited keynote by Murray Turoff at the Pre-ICIS 07 Workshop on Decision Support for Extreme Events: Learning from Success and Failure, December 9 th , 2007, Montreal, UQAM. Keywords Extreme Events, Muddling Through, Decision Support, Dynamic Emergency Management INTRODUCTION Extreme events are complex and difficult to understand. Managing such diverse and unpredictable situations calls for many people to interact together in the form of groups: tens, hundreds, or more likely, thousands of individuals working collaboratively. These groups have dynamic membership whereby individuals come and go as the needs of the emergency management and response change. Katrina can be viewed as an extreme event that was both natural and man made if one considers the actions of mankind over the past hundred years in destroying natural mitigation conditions and making short sighted decisions. Another significant characteristic of extreme events is that they do not recognize or stop at either geographical or political boundaries. In the case of Katrina we had and have numerous problems arising from the lack of coordination, cooperation, and collaboration throughout the areas of planning, mitigation, response, and even consistency of recovery. It is highly unlikely that in an extreme event, whether natural or man made, that all those that need to collaborate will have trained together nor that the problems they will face will be well known ahead of time, and the numbers escalate for major international events. Different individuals are most likely needed in the many different phases from planning through response and finally recovery. The results are hundreds of individuals in various roles of providing expertise, doing analysis and recommending or decision making. Another example of the large number of organizations that become involved is related by Chen, Sharman, Rao, Upadhyaya, and Cook-Cottone’s (in press) account of response to a large October snowstorm in upstate New York that left over a million people without electricity for up to ten days. Among the organizations that needed to coordinate were local response organizations at the village, town, city or county level, New York Electricity & Gas, the State Emergency Management Office, State Health Department, State Highway Proceedings of the 5 th International ISCRAM Conference – Washington, DC, USA, May 2008 F. Fiedrich and B. Van de Walle, eds. 462