Co-Adaptive Systems in Urban Firefighting: A Systems Analysis of Coordination Breakdowns
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Date
2011-06
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The Ohio State University
Abstract
The management of complex systems can be quite difficult given the dynamic nature of systems and due to a large web of interdependencies. Nearly all domains will utilize some sort of joint activity, but the coordination across the different aspects of joint activity becomes increasingly difficult when the situation is high tempo, high risk, and constantly changing. It is important to understand the problems that can arise from such a system in order to help those within the system perform better and safer.
The overall goal of this project was to observe coordination problems in a specific kind of co-adaptive system in order to develop design concepts and principles. Urban firefighting was chosen because the domain exemplifies many of the challenges of coordination in high tempo and high risk situations.
Incident Reports were gathered from a major metropolitan fire department and interviews were conducted with the Columbus Fire Department to assemble a collection of case studies that displayed breakdowns in coordination during actual incidents. Based on an analysis of these cases studies, the following were found to contribute to coordination problems: communication problems, poor control, information overload, loss of situational awareness, and poor adaptation to new events. Key requirements for developing a system to combat these problems include supporting – integrating different perspectives, proving shared location knowledge, facilitating anticipation, facilitating adaptation to new events, and providing multiple forms of communication under highly constrained conditions.
With these improvements, the people, teams and functional roles will be able to collaborate and perform more effectively. The key performance goal is to reduce conditions where teams act in locally adaptive ways but miss changing interdependencies so that their behavior is maladaptive from a more global perspective. Urban firefighting, however, is not unique and the challenges of coordination in these complex systems are ubiquitous to any domain that involves joint activity under pressure. Therefore, key requirements identified in this study can be applied in multiple domains.
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Keywords
Co-Adaptive Systems, Coordination Breakdowns, Urban Firefighting, Adaptation, Situational Awareness, Joint Activity