Multiple Incident Management

• Component: ADMIN - DISASTER LEVELS (refers to the Trac component)
• Importance: This capability must be included in a 1.0 release
• Proposed by: Gavin TREADGOLD (add your name if you contribute to specifying this requirement)
• Supported by: (add your name if you support this requirement - this is an indication of support/interest, proposers are naturally assumed to be supporters)
• Developers: (please add your name if you are working on, or wish to work on improving this capability in Sahana)

An Emergency Management Information System needs to be capable of managing multiple incidents at any one time.

Currently this capability is provided by the concept of Disaster Levels (Admin > Disaster Levels). Unfortunately the existing three-tiered structure is a little too inflexible to support the way Emergency Managers are likely to work - especially as there is often no fixed definition around hierarchies of incidents. It also makes the handling of incidents that may start small, but grow to be a very significant problem, difficult. The management interface also doesn't provide a good overview of existing events.

Please strike through them if they have been closed. Please list all relevant bugs here. Please link back to this page from each relevant bug in Trac by placing the following URL in a Trac comment - http://wiki.sahana.lk/doku.php/req:multiple_incident_management

• #58 Incident displays in header when DIC disabled
• #65 Hide Disaster Level config till enabled
• #66 Not able to activate Disaster Levels
• #69 Move to more flexible incident hierarchy
• #70 Changing current incident does not update in the header
• #71 Registered Incidents should only show if event has been created
• #95 No check for duplicate incidents

An improved Multiple Incident Management capability should achieve the following:

• Provide a more flexible and free-form means of managing incidents.
• Avoid the use of 'loaded' terminology - Incident is commonly used in many countries for the management of emergencies and disasters (e.g. Incident Management/Control/Co-ordination System), so we should stick with just using the term Incident.
• It should be possible to view an overview of all incidents - possibly in a tree/indented list structure. This may work best in a tabular structure, with other options such as edit, archive etc provided as links to the right of the table.
• New incidents should be able to be added at either the top level, or under and existing incident.
• The hierarchy should be able to be an arbitrary depth deep.
• It should be possible to select 2 or more incidents and combine them as children under a new parent incident (e.g. 3 separate bushfire incidents, may become children under a new incident to manage them all). This may be accomplished by ticking action tick-boxes next to each event, and then selecting 'Merge under new incident' action that guides the user to create a new incident which has the existing selected incidents added as children to the new parent incident.
• It should be possible to mark incidents as Active or Archived.
• It would be useful to allow root level incidents to be assigned a priority/sorting order.
• The incident combo in the header may want to provide a quick link to the admin section for those that have ACLs that permit management of incidents as a quick means to jump to management.

• There should be a 'default incident' created at the top level in a new installation of Sahana.

It would be better to give people an initial setup screen that would give them immediate access once the system was installed. Perhaps this could be part of the web setup installation script?