ORIGINAL ARTICLE GDIA: Eliciting information requirements in emergency first response Lili Yang • Raj Prasanna • Malcolm King Received: 27 February 2013 / Accepted: 16 January 2014 Ó Springer-Verlag London 2014 Abstract Good information is vital for first responders in an emergency. However, although information systems can provide vast amounts of data, the information requirements of emergency first responders in complex, dynamic, ad hoc, and stressful environments cannot be systematically cap- tured by existing requirement engineering approaches. This paper outlines the unique features of emergency response operations first and then drives an emergency-response- specific method to suit those features. The method is named as goal-directed information analysis (GDIA), which is based on but easier to use than an approach, goal- directed task analysis. We argue that goals are implicit and thus difficult to be captured from first responders because of the features of the emergency operations. GDIA starts from scenarios and has seven clearly defined and repeat- able steps, including task analysis, which then leads to a simpler and more accurate analysis of the goal structure, before the rest of the hierarchy, including decisions and information requirements, is completed. A case study is presented using this GDIA approach to retrieve information requirements for four types of key fire fighters responding to a fire in a high-risk building environment. This work led to several real applications in the emergency service area, indicating the success of the approach. Keywords Information requirements elicitation Á Emergency response Á Goal-directed information analysis Á Situational awareness 1 Introduction To cope effectively with natural or man-made disasters such as fire, flood, tsunami, or terrorist attack and to avoid fatal catastrophes, it is essential to have appropriate information about the situation. Emergency first responders must rapidly identify the situation context of the disaster (e.g. a large fire in a building), which is often highly dynamic, so that various key decisions are made quickly and accurately [13, 22]. Hence, it is important to develop information systems (IS) to provide crucial information rapidly to help make vital decisions correctly at the onset of an emergency [7, 13]. Nowadays, many businesses are evolving and are looking at the capability of dealing with vast amounts of data with a limited temporal horizon [24]. The emergency response operations are critical, for first responders have very limited time, and careful examination of alternatives would introduce delays that may cost lives and property loss. We argue that developing IS to support first responders is different from to support generic busi- ness situations, and typical requirement engineering (RE) approaches are not well fitted for IS supporting emergency situations due to the following unique features of emer- gency response operations [28]. Firstly, the scale and demands of disasters require the participation of many different response organizations. Depending upon the severity of the crisis, emergency response may involve numerous organizations, including multiple layers of government, public authorities such as fire and rescue services, ambulance services and police L. Yang (&) Á M. King School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK e-mail: L.Yang@lboro.ac.uk M. King e-mail: M.King@lboro.ac.uk R. Prasanna Joint Centre for Disaster Research, Massey University, Wellington 6140, New Zealand e-mail: R.Prasanna@massey.ac.nz 123 Requirements Eng DOI 10.1007/s00766-014-0202-2