Abstract: Intensive information transmission and exchange during emergency response is significant for its perform-ance.However,quantitative modeling and performance improvement on the timeliness and efficiency of rescue operations and decision instruction flow are absent in existing studies on mechanism of emergency response in waterway transporta-tion.A workflow model is introduced into the timeliness and accuracy assessment of information flow in waterway emer-gency response.Based on the analysis on the procedure of waterway emergency response and several typical waterway ac-cident scenarios,an instruction repository is added onto the organization time resources messages net (OTRM-NET) workflow model.On the basis of the conventional Petri-net model,a waterway emergency response model contains deci-sion information feedback is proposed.Moreover,the estimated period of operation can be computed by time performance of this model.Simulations are utilized to compare the operation time of OTRM-NET with that of conventional scheme. The efficiency of information transmission is quantitatively represented by error transmission rate and an algorithm on performance of information delivery is furthermore proposed.This algorithm is simulated in emergency response plans to compute the efficiency of information delivery.This model is applied to a case study of a specific waterway accident.When comparing the emergency time of OTRM-NET with that of other models,the values are reduced by 2 721 s on average. Taking the information delivery library of the ships involve in a typical accident as a case study,the overall transmissibili-ty of the accident identified by vessel traffic system (VTS)is decreased from 15% to 9.52%.The local transmissibility of the accident found by VTS is declined from 37.5% to 22.22%.Those indicate that by adding confirmation of ship informa-tion,the influence of false alarm from VTS is decreased by 36.53%.And the impacts on transmission of accident infor-mation are decreased by 40.75%.Meanwhile,the execution deviation can be detected and corrected ahead of 2 duty cy-cles,which would reduce the instruction deviation within the workflow.This proposed efficiency evaluation model is prac-tical in supporting emergency planning and formulation of the workflow of emergency response in multi-task and multi-role environment.