Design and Development of a Virtual Emergency Operations Center for Disaster Management Research, Training, and Discovery

This paper describes the implementation plans and research activities of Project Ensayo, which is developing a virtual emergency operations center (vEOC) based on one of the Nation's premier EOC 's, that of Miami-Dade County. The goal of the EOC is to coordinate for 'community continuity', in other words help communities remain resilient in the face of disaster events. Organizations of this sort suffer from the lack of normal conditions that permit organizational learning in the traditional sense. The development of the Ensayo vEOC will support a portfolio of research projects including topics related to sensor data, knowledge and social networking modeling, decision-making, software approaches to commitment-based collaboration and coordination, time-critical negotiations under emergencies, and cyber-infrastructure resources.