The decisions made by the operation commander in emergency situations should be
made quickly to save lives. To avoid late or bad decisions, the commander must
construct a situational awareness. The irregular arrival flow of information,
uncertainty, information overload and lack of persistence are the main factors
that hinder this task. To minimize these effects we propose an architecture
composed of mobile devices and a decision support system to be used in the
command post. The main point in the system design is the cognitive overload.
Therefore, heuristics about the usage of the information by experienced
commanders were elicited and implemented.