Conditions for Normative Decision Making at the Fire Ground
This work addresses decision-making challenges for emergency responders like firefighters, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing technological and theoretical shifts without introducing a fundamentally new method.
The paper tackles the problem of improving decision-making at fire grounds by addressing the gap between human and machine perception and questioning human rationality, proposing a framework that incorporates normative and prescriptive approaches and allows for performance comparison.
We discuss the changes in an attitude to decision making at the fire ground. The changes are driven by the recent technological shift. The emerging new approaches in sensing and data processing (under common umbrella of Cyber-Physical Systems) allow for leveling off the gap, between humans and machines, in perception of the fire ground. Furthermore, results from descriptive decision theory question the rationality of human choices. This creates the need for searching and testing new approaches for decision making during emergency. We propose the framework that addresses this need. The primary feature of the framework are possibilities for incorporation of normative and prescriptive approaches to decision making. The framework also allows for comparison of the performance of decisions, between human and machine.