In the wake of large-scale national and international terrorist incidents, it is critical to provide first responders and rescue personnel with tools and techniques that will enable them to evaluate response readiness and tactics, measure inter-agency coordination and improve training and decision making capability. We focus in particular on building tools for training and tactics evaluation for incident commanders, who are in charge of managing teams of fire fighters at critical incidents. Such tools would provide intelligent software agents that simulate first responder tactics, decisions, and behaviors in simulated urban areas and allow the incident commander (human) to interact. These agents form teams, where each agent simulates a fire engine, which plans and acts autonomously in a simulated environment. Through interactions with these software agents, an incident commander can evaluate tactics and realize the consequences of key decisions, while responding to such disasters.

To this end, we have constructed a new system in close cooperation with the Los Angeles fire department and and personnel from the Homeland Security Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE). We refer to this system as DEFACTO (Demonstrating Effective Flexible Agent Coordination of Teams through Omnipresence). DEFACTO incorporates state of the art artificial intelligence, 3D visualization and human-interaction reasoning into a unique high fidelity system for training incident commanders. By providing the incident commander interaction with the coordinating agent team in a complex environment, the commander can gain experience and draw valuable lessons that will be applicable in the real world. The DEFACTO system achieves this via three main components:

1. Omnipresent Viewer - intuitive interface,
2. Proxy Framework - for team coordination, and
3. Flexible Interaction - between the incident commander and the team.

Disaster response provides a dynamic world in which decisions must be made correctly and quickly because human safety is at risk. However, it also holds potential for agents to take on responsibility in order to free the humans involved from being unnecessarily overburdened in a time of crisis. When using DEFACTO, incident commanders have the opportunity to see the disaster and the coordination/resource constraints unfold so that they can be better prepared when commanding over an actual disaster. Applying DEFACTO to disaster response holds a great potential benefit to the training of incident commanders in the fire department. DEFACTO has been repeatedly demonstrated to key police and fire department personnel in Los Angeles area with very positive feedback.

With DEFACTO, our objective is to both enable the human to have a clear idea of the team’s state and improve agent-human team performance. We want DEFACTO agent-human teams to better prepare firefighters for current human-only teams and better prepare them for the future, in which agent-human teams will be inevitable and invaluable. We believe that leveraging the above aspects DEFACTO will result in better disaster response methods and better incident commanders.