I'm looking for software that can assist me in analyzing the course of action during an emergency response exercise by investigating communication between those who participated in the exercise.
I have a log (in a spreadsheet table) of 6-700 messages between 20 emergency response agencies during an emergency response exercise. For each of the 6-700 messages, I have information about time that the message was sent, who the sender was, the message content, and the receiver of the message. I have furthermore categorized the messages according to which event the message is about (several hazard events during the exercise) and according to several other criteria (e.g. if a question/request or information is communicated, if the message contains information about location or place names, if the message is about allocation of resources, if it is a situation report etc.).
I picture information visualized in a matrix with time on one axis and different emergency response agencies on the other, and messages containing requests and information moving between the agencies plotted in the matrix in a way that enable identification of different threads and different types of content. An aim is to identify threads that have a satisfactory outcome (e.g. question resolved, decision made, action taken) or unsatisfactory outcome (messages getting lost on the way).
A further aim is to find new ways to evaluate an exercise just after it has been taking place.
All suggestions are welcome.
I suggest to represent the 20 agencies in a graph e.g. adjacency matrix. Of course, to maintain directional communication you would use a 20x20 matrix (representing the graph that represents all possible communication pairs) . There are libraries in Python and Perl that will facilitate the analysis of such matrices and with 20 agencies, the model is not too large to run it on a desktop computer.
Industrial engineers do some of this work. Here is a paper that looked at some of that
Emergency department communication links and patterns.
Fairbanks RJ, Bisantz AM, Sunm M.
Ann Emerg Med. 2007 Oct;50(4):396-406. Epub 2007 Jun 7. Erratum in: Ann Emerg Med. 2007 Nov;50(5):568.
Thanks Armin, Sandra, and Toby
All three suggestions are interesting. I will look into it.
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