The EMERDEC project addresses a central challenge in disaster management, namely: How do emergency services make decisions in highly critical situations - and how can digital support systems optimally accompany them?

The project focuses on innovative approaches such as:

• Empirical field research and cognitive task analyses
• Real-time data collection through wearables and mobile devices
• Simulation-based experiments in VR environments

The goal is to develop a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of decision-making in order to create the technological and ethical foundations for the next generation of decision support systems. Building on this improved understanding, the question of which technological and ethical conditions must be met in order to implement AI systems in the context of decision support will be clarified. The projects also investigates which systems have proven to be suitable in different fields. EMERDEC provides insights into how information must be prepared and presented in order to be able to incorporate it into decision-making processes in the most needs-oriented, gender-equitable and seamless way possible, without causing information overload. In addition, the project also looks at the question as to whether it is possible for AI systems to learn from human experience and provide improved decision support in security measures.

Within EMERDEC, DCNA highlights the social context effects of the actors' decision-making. After all, decision-making depends very much on the social definition of the situation. The decision-making process is modeled as a two-stage selection process of situational understandings ("frames") and instructions for action (scripts) from multiple and potentially conflicting possibilities. In order to improve the comprehensibility of these selection processes, the logic of the situation, i.e., the interaction of internal and external conditions, is investigated together with the emergency services using real decision-making situations and with the help of ethnographic field research methods. The internal conditions include, for example, subjective values, attitudes and empirical knowledge, while the external conditions include opportunities (available resources), institutional rules (norms, chains of command, SOPs, cultural values), and the behavior of the various actors (e.g., comrades, civilians, cooperating organizations such as emergency services).

Project partners organizations:

• IRIS - Industrial Risk and Safety Solutions
• Vienna fire department (City of Vienna)
• Carinthia State Fire Brigade School (Carinthia State Fire Brigade Association)
• University of Graz
• Disaster Competence Network Austria
• Furtwangen University
• JOANNEUM RESEARCH

The EMERDEC project is funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency FFG through the Austrian security research program KIRAS with funds from the Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF), and supported by the Austrian Federal Fire Brigade Association.

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