Evaluating computational assistance for crisis response

In this paper we examine the behavior of a human-computer system for crisis response. As one instance of crisis management, we describe the task of responding to spills and fires involving hazardous materials. We then describe INCA, an intelligent assistant for planning and scheduling in this domain, and its relation to human users. We focus on INCA's strategy of retrieving a case from a case library, seeding the initial schedule, and then helping the user adapt this seed. We also present three hypotheses about the behavior of this mixed-initiative system and some experiments designed to test them. The results suggest that our approach leads to faster response development than user-generated or automatically-generated schedules but without sacrificing solution quality.