Collaborative Methodology for Crisis Management Knowledge Integration and Visualization

Crisis management needs intensive cooperation of a significant amount of stakeholders. These stakeholders need to cooperate during the critical peak of crisis, and also during crisis preparation and long term recovery phases. In addition, agents have to learn from each other and from previous events. However, they have different perspectives based on their backgrounds, previous experiences and interests. Collaborative modelling methodologies can help on this knowledge gathering and integration process. This paper presents Group Model Building collaborative methodology and its use on a crisis management research project, where a set of international and multidisciplinary domain experts discussed and contributed to three simulation models development. Through several exercises experts shared and integrated their perspectives, which were initially fragmented. Domain experts also took part in models validation. Resulting models constitute a more holistic, integrated and agreed visualization of crises than the ones each agent had at the beginning of the modelling process.