Moderated decision support and countermeasure planning for off-site emergency management

Abstract

Emergency situations, both man-made and natural, can vary substantially, however, they do share the characteristic of sudden onset and the necessity for a coherent and effective emergency management. In the event of a nuclear or radiological accident in Europe, the real-time on-line decision support system RODOS provides support from the early phase through to the medium and long-term phases. This paper describes the role of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) in ensuring the transparency of decision processes within off-site emergency management. A moderated decision making workshop based on a hypothetical accident scenario focusing on the evaluation of long-term countermeasures using the RODOS system and MCDA methods is presented. © 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.