Designing an emergency management simulation testbed to investigate incident management team performance

Investigating real-life disasters and crises has been challenging due to accompanying difficulties and risks posed by these complex phenomena. Previous research in the emergency management domain has largely relied on qualitative approaches to describe the event after it occurred. To facilitate investigations for more generalizable findings, this paper documents ongoing efforts to design an emergency management simulation testbed called Team Emergency Operations Simulation (TEOS) in which an incident management team (IMT) is situated. First, we describe the design process based on our previous work. Next, we present the overall description of TEOS including representative roles, tasks, and team environments. We also propose measures of team performance of the IMT and propose future research that can be realized through TEOS.