New Aspects of Emergency Decision Support for Ships in Distress

The paper describes an effort to capture and model human behaviour during emergency management, particularly in situations of ships in distress. This research is based on authors‟ previous work on the project for development of Decision Support System (DSS) for emergency management that supports decisions related to maritime crisis. Implemented DSS helps to structure and organize large quantity of information related to the emergency management in case of maritime accidents, especially spatial data, in order to make it available to decision makers in a comprehensible and user-friendly way. The continuation of the research resulted in recognition of four main problems: (1) huge number of potential Place of Refuge (PoR), (2) lot of selection criteria (3) there are usually lot of scenarios due to dynamic conditions, (4) end users are emergency operators, not experts. The task of operator is to suggest a solution for maritime crisis to upper authority levels. So, it could be concluded that even though implemented DSS covers all decision levels it still leaves lot of decisions to operators and thus puts lot of pressure on them. The main challenge is to support decision making process in order to eliminate those problems and make DSS as efficient and supportive as possible. Human intellect could be substituted with algorithms, memory with data bases, but what about human “will” to solve problems and act in emergency management situations. The “will” could be seen as composed of sensitive and intuitive part of decision maker‟s mind versus mental part (intellect and memory). If performed under pressure, intuitive decision making could lead to unexpected decisions with catastrophic consequences. This paper recognizes and models such sensitive/intuitive part of decision making and incorporates it into DSS, thus avoiding a possibility for making poor decisions during emergency support for ships in distress.