Analyzing Incident Management Event Sequences with Interactive Visualization

While traditional safety and incident analysis has mostly focused on incident attributes data, such as the location and time of the incident, there are other aspects in incident response that are temporal in nature and are more difficult to analyze. We describe a visual analytics tool for temporal data exploration, called LifeFlow, used for the analysis of incident response data. LifeFlow provides user-controlled overviews of event sequences (e.g. notification, arrival, clearance etc). It allows analysts to interactively explore temporal patterns, find anomalies in sequences and compare management practices. This type of analysis can potentially lead to process improvements and save human lives. We used NCHRP traffic incident data with more than 200,000 incidents are reported by eight different agencies in a period of about 28 months. Our experience suggest that even non expert analysts can spot many anomalies in the data using the LifeFlow overviews, and are able to rapidly ask many questions and find differences between agencies.