Coordination of decision-making in crisis management

Abstract

Catastrophic civil events give rise to large and complex response operations involving many agencies and individuals. Coordination of this response operation has been a long standing problem that cannot be solved by simply creating better procedures; on the contrary, it is an emergent and transmuting phenomenon that arises in the interactions between multiple agents as they confront high risks, short time-scales and poor data. This chapter examines coordination by considering crisis management in terms of distributed multi-agent decisionmaking. Coordination is then identified separately with the planning, actions, communications and knowledge of this multi-agent system. This framework is used to examine decision-making coordination at the scene of a major railway accident at Clapham UK in 1988. Decisions affected by the particular difficulty of ensuring the electrical isolation of the accident scene are a focus for the case study. Factors influencing the quality of coordination are assayed from the case study and this analysis informs our understanding of crisis management preparedness and training.