Mordecai & Kantsepolsky Intelligent Utilization of Dashboards in Emergency Management WiPe Paper – 1st International Workshop on Intelligent Crisis Management Technologies for Climate Events (ICMT) Proceedings of the 15th ISCRAM Conference – Rochester, NY, USA May 2018 Kees Boersma and Brian Tomaszewski, eds. Intelligent Utilization of Dashboards in Emergency Management Yaniv Mordecai Motorola Solutions Israel yaniv.mordecai@motorolasolutions.com Boris Kantsepolsky Motorola Solutions Israel boris.kantsepolsky@motorolasolutions.com ABSTRACT Effective decision-supporting visualization is critical for strategic, tactic, and operational management before and during a large-scale climate or extreme weather emergency. Most emergency management applications traditionally consist of map-based event and object visualization and management, which is necessary for operations, but has small contribution to decision makers. At the same time, analytical models and simulations that usually enable prediction and situation evaluation are often analyst-oriented and detached from the operational command and control system. Nevertheless, emergencies tend to generate unpredictable effects, which may require new decision-support tools in real-time, based on alternative data sources or data streams. In this paper, we advocate the use of dashboards for emergency management, but more importantly, we propose an intelligent mechanism to support effective and efficient utilization of data and information for decision-making via flexible deployment and visualization of data streams and metric displays. We employ this framework in the H2020 beAWARE project that aims to develop and demonstrate an innovative framework for enhanced decision support and management services in extreme weather climate events. Keywords Emergency Management, Natural Disasters, Dashboards, Business Intelligence, Decision Support Systems. INTRODUCTION 2017 saw an onslaught of natural disasters in North America, including a series of devastating Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, a severe earthquake in Mexico, wildfires in California, and a massive-scale blizzard that struck the entire central-eastern part of the USA. This trail of devastation caused thousands of casualties, hundreds of billions of dollars in damages, and massive disruptions of normal life – and has shown the difficulty in coping with natural disasters in developing countries like Mexico and Puerto-Rico as well as super-developed countries like the USA. The difficulties and tremendous efforts needed for preparation, absorption, and recovery, have further raised the global awareness of the need for holistic national emergency management agencies, that would be equipped with state-of-the-art technology to run the operation – before, during, and after the emergency, in order to reinstate normal routine as fast as possible, and to prevent the emergency from escalating towards a disaster or a crisis. beAWARE is an EU-funded project (#700475) to deliver a prototype disaster management system for extreme weather conditions. beAWARE focuses on flood, forest fire, and heatwave scenarios. The beAWARE platform is an end-to-end solution for collecting information from multiple data sources – such as end users, social networks, sensors, and data providers – analyzing it, predicting and assessing emergencies, alerting the public, and managing first responders' activities. (beAWARE 2017). As part of beAWARE, we were required to provide a comprehensive solution to visualize decision-supporting information to senior authority officials, decision-makers, and stakeholders (e.g., mayor, chief inspector, or head of emergency services). This resulted in the need to consider various options for advanced visualization that would cover the various requirements made by the operational stakeholders who participate in the project. We decided to tackle this problem as a management problem similar to the one faced by decision-makers and managers in everyday business contexts, through the use of Business Intelligence & Analytics (BI&A) –