Human Factors and Decision-Making in Maritime Emergency Coordination: A Coordination Demand Index for Search and Rescue Control Centres

Resumen

Maritime emergency coordination places shore-based controllers under acute cognitive demand: they must convert fragmentary alerts into  coordinated responses under time pressure and incomplete information. While maritime safety research has extensively analysed the causes of accidents, comparatively little has addressed the decision support available at the coordination centre where the response is managed. This paper develops an operational reading of accident data for the Spanish Search and Rescue (SAR) region.
Using 276 accidents investigated by the Spanish Commission for the Investigation of Maritime Accidents and Incidents (CIAIM, 2008–2017), together with the official activity statistics and staffing structure of the Spanish Maritime Safety and Rescue Agency (Salvamento Marítimo), it proposes a Coordination Demand Index (CDI): a transparent composite that maps the observable characteristics of an incident to an estimate of the coordination effort it is likely to require. Index weights are anchored in a permutation-importance analysis, which confirms that compliance with the minimum safe-manning requirement is the dominant variable and that visibility is effectively noninformative for this region. The CDI is defined in two states — a priori, from data available at the first alert (using the type-conditioned base rate of undermanning), and updated as the emergency reveals the actual manning status — mirroring decisionmaking under incomplete information. Recurrent accident archetypes are mapped onto a three-tier screen-triage scheme, and a workload model shows that the average percontroller load is low; coordination demand arises instead from incident complexity and from its concentration in a few centres and in the long night shift. Presented as a transparent, operationally grounded proposal — robust to its weighting choices, with prospective validation against measured coordination demand set out as the next step — the instruments are offered as complementary aids to the controller's judgement, not as substitutes for it.