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Synthetic Environments for Investigating Collaborative Information Seeking: An Application in Emergency Restoration of Critical Infrastructures

  • David Mendonça EMAIL logo , William A. Wallace , Barbara Cutler and James Brooks
Published/Copyright: December 17, 2015

Abstract

Large-scale disasters can produce profound disruptions in the fabric of interdependent critical infrastructure systems such as water, telecommunications and electric power. The work of post-disaster infrastructure restoration typically requires information sharing and close collaboration across these sectors; yet – due to a number of factors – the means to investigate decision making phenomena associated with these activities are limited. This paper motivates and describes the design and implementation of a computer-based synthetic environment for investigating collaborative information seeking in the performance of a (simulated) infrastructure restoration task. The main contributions of this work are twofold. First, it develops a set of theoretically grounded measures of collaborative information seeking processes and embeds them within a computer-based system. Second, it suggests how these data may be organized and modeled to yield insights into information seeking processes in the performance of a complex, collaborative task. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications of this work for practice and for future research.


Corresponding author: David Mendonça, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute – Industrial and Systems Engineering, Troy, NY, USA, e-mail:

Acknowledgments

This research was supported in part by US Department of Homeland Security Grant 2008-ST-061-ND 0001 to W.A. Wallace and by a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute VPR Seed Grant to D. Mendonça, B. Cutler and W.A. Wallace.

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Published Online: 2015-12-17
Published in Print: 2015-9-1

©2015 by De Gruyter

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