Representing uncertainty in situation maps for disaster management

Emergency staff perform their task under mental and time pressure, especially when leading the emergency operation on-scene next to the damaged area. The mobile command vehicle provides lots of supporting tools to conduct the operation successfully. We here focus on the situation map. It is used by the emergency staff to provide an overview of all operational information at a glance. The map contains certain and uncertain information, which is to be displayed differently. In this work we analyse the state-of-the-art uncertainty representation both from a theoretical and practical point of view, and examine alternative uncertainty representation techniques. We propose two new techniques to display uncertain information. In an empirical evaluation we show that these techniques allow a higher performance of the map-reader than the state-of-the-art technique in terms of classifying the displayed information correctly. Given that there is reduced space for the situation map in a mobile command vehicle compared to stationary emergency operation centers, space-saving uncertainty representation proposals could be particularly interesting for displaying situation maps on smaller screens.