Resilience to the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Distributed Situation Awareness Perspective

Abstract

Provisionary command centers for containing disease outbreaks can be an effective strategy in coordinating efforts by different government ministries and agencies to provide resilience that limits human and economic losses. This paper applies the Distributed Situation Awareness (DSA) framework to investigate the fundamental design and operational principles of provisionary command centers that contribute to the resilience against disease outbreaks. The investigation involves a case study on modeling the DSA of the Taiwan Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) that coordinates multiple government ministries and agencies to contain COVID-19. Task, knowledge, and social networks were developed and combined into one DSA network model to depict how the CECC operations in processing and distributing information enhance situation awareness (SA) of all the government agencies and citizens for a coordinated response to the pandemic. The DSA network model illustrates an interorganizational system architecture that can enable graceful extensibility of various government functions and sustained adaptability of the agencies against disease outbreaks.