Prospect‐Theoretic Risk Assessment of Emergency Response Performance Under Procedural Dependency and Organizational Collaboration: A Dynamic Metanetwork‐Based Framework

What the paper says

Emergency response performance assessment (ERPA) is critical for improving emergency management by supporting proactive risk identification and post event improvement. Existing ERPA approaches based on conceptual frameworks or system effectiveness seldom capture operational mechanisms, the decision-makers' bounded rationality, and the joint effects of procedure dependency and organizational collaboration. To address these limitations, this study develops a dynamic metanetwork-based risk analysis framework grounded in prospect theory that emphasizes multisubjective interactions within emergency response systems and distorted performance perceptions of decision-makers. The emergency response system is represented as a dynamic metanetwork with four node types, including procedure, organization, resource, and information, connected through seven subnetworks that describe system operations. Satisfaction indicators are defined at the single-procedure level and transformed using S-shaped timeliness functions to reflect bounded rationality under prospect theory, then extended to multi-procedure settings to capture procedural dependency. Key forms of organizational collaboration are identified, including procedure hand-offs, co-assignments, and resource negotiations, and collaboration indicators are constructed to measure alignment between organizational networks and these collaboration forms. Procedure timeliness and organizational collaboration are finally integrated through a fuzzy affiliation function to account for external uncertainty. The proposed framework is illustrated through a risk ERPA of the Manchester Arena attack, with sensitivity and comparative analysis demonstrating its effectiveness in complex settings.