Supervisory decision making in emergency response application

Two main causes of failure in an emergency response scenario are in communication leading to limited or delayed access to the information and delayed or poor decision making. A good choice of communication infrastructure to provide reliable and in-time delivery of information in early stage of an emergency response saves lives and money. Given that a wireless mesh is deployed or another communication infrastructure exists, the next effort is to send data from the field to decision makers off the field to improve decision making. In this paper, we use discrete event system modeling technique to illustrate how use of supervisory control solutions on on a discrete event system model can improve communication at organizational level. We present challenges and lessons learned from several real-life drills we have participated such as unclear termination or incomplete message transfer. We delineate a supervisory control solution that with higher authority and expertise can improve decision making by canceling a path and enforcing a deadlock-free path. © 2013 IEEE.