Incident management decision support system implemented using Java

This paper presents a prototype incident management decision support system developed using Java development tools. The incident duration and delay estimation models and heuristic resource allocation rules used in the development of the prototype are based on the models used in the Wide-Area Incident Management Support System (WAIMSS) software developed at the Virginia Tech Center for Transportation Research. The Java based application present various advantages over the UNIX based WAIMSS due to its use of one of the common Web browsers as the user interface and object oriented nature of the Java language that allows the re-use of applets for developing the prototype. Although the prototype presented in this paper is not a full implementation of WAIMSS and lacks its Geographical Information Systems capabilities, it clearly demonstrates that Java and Internet will the natural choices for the development of similar real-time decision support systems in the future.