SAW-Oriented User Interfaces for Emergency Dispatch Systems

Situational awareness (SAW) is a concept widely spread in application areas that require critical decision-making, such as in emergency dispatching systems. SAW is related to the level of consciousness that an individual or team has to a situation. SAW-oriented UI for critical systems require specialized user interfaces to provide operators a dynamic understanding of what is happening in an environment. The information to be managed by such interfaces affects the way operators in an emergency dispatch system acquire, maintain and recover SAW. A challenging issue on the design of SAW-oriented interfaces is how the human-system interaction process can be redesigned for the enhancement of SAW considering environments with potential large scale heterogeneous multi sensors data in complex, ever-changing situations. The problem is increased when such information is subject to uncertainty, which may compromise the acquisition of the situational awareness. Also, humans are expected to make decisions based on their own understanding of what is going on, which allied to experience and expertise can be valuable assets to be used to process refinement during the construction of an incremental knowledge. The goal of this paper is to introduce a conceptual framework to create specialized interfaces that support the participation of operators in the process of SAW acquisition. Such SAW-oriented interface presents a tight integration between the operator and the other phases of an assessment process, such as information quality assessment, information fusion and information visualization. A robbery event report, in an emergency dispatch system, is used as a case study to demonstrate practical and promising results of the applicability of our solution.