Modeling an incident management team as a joint cognitive system

Abstract

Resilience is considered an essential capability of an Incident Management Team (IMT) in planning for and responding to disasters and catastrophes. While IMTs have been studied as a decision-making unit, few attempts were made to view them from a Joint Cognitive System (JCS) perspective that highlights the interplay among humans and technical agents and demands imposed by the incident. To that end, this paper presents a JCS model of the IMT grounded in findings from the existing literature and naturalistic observations of simulated IMT's incident action planning, which functions in a cyclic manner across multiple scales. Using this model, three measures for resilience of the IMT, recovery time, resource status, and interactions, are discussed. To effectively represent the resilient performance incorporating these measures, a novel adoption of the Interactive Episode Analysis method is utilized. By providing a few examples of the analysis method, this study provides proof-of-concept for objective assessment of the resilience characteristics of the IMT. The proposed JCS-based IMT model can be used for descriptive modeling of similar systems to investigate resilient performance.