A Distributed Scenario-Based Decision Support System for Robust Decision-Making in Complex Situations

Decision-making in emergency management is a challenging task as the consequences of decisions are considerable, the threatened systems are complex and information is often uncertain. This paper presents a distributed system facilitating better-informed decision-making in strategic emergency management. The construction of scenarios provides a rationale for collecting, organising, and processing information. The set of scenarios captures the uncertainty of the situation and its developments. The relevance of scenarios is ensured by gearing the scenario construction to assessing alternatives, thus avoiding time-consuming processing of irrelevant information. The scenarios are constructed in a distributed setting allowing for a flexible adaptation of reasoning (principles and processes) to both the problem at hand and the information available. This approach ensures that each decision can be founded on a coherent set of scenarios. The theoretical framework is demonstrated in a distributed decision support system by orchestrating experts into workflows tailored to each specific decision.

Interaction Design Principles for Web Emergency Management Information Systems

The interaction design for web emergency management information systems (WEMIS) is an important aspect to keep in mind due to the criticality of the domain: decision making, updating available resources, defining a task list, and trusting in proposed information. A common interaction design strategy for WEMIS seems to be needed, but currently there are few references in literature. The aim of this study is to contribute to this lack with a set of interactive principles for WEMIS. From the emergency point of view, existing WEMIS have been analyzed to extract common features and to design interactive principles for emergency. Furthermore, the authors studied design principles extracted from a well-known (DERMIS) model relating them to emergency phases and features. The result proposed here is a set of design principles for supporting interactive properties for WEMIS. Finally, two case studies have been considered as applications of proposed design principles.

Visualizing Composite Knowledge in Emergency Responses using Spatial Hypertext

Having the right information at the right time is crucial to make decisions during emergency response. To fulfill this requirement, emergency management systems must provide emergency managers with knowledge management and visualization tools. The goal is twofold: on one hand, to organize knowledge coming from different sources, mainly the emergency response plans (the formal knowledge) and the information extracted from the emergency development (the contextual knowledge), and on the other hand, to enable effective access to information. Formal and contextual knowledge sets are mostly disjoint; however, there are cases in which a formal knowledge piece may be updated with some contextual information, constituting composite knowledge. In this paper, the authors extend a knowledge framework with the notion of composite knowledge, and use spatial hypertext to visualize this type of knowledge. The authors illustrate the proposal with a case study on accessing to information during an emergency response in an underground transportation system.

Supporting the Allocation of Traumatized Patients with a Decision Support System

In this paper, the authors present a business rules-based decision support system for the allocation of traumatized patients. The assignment of patients to vehicles and hospitals is a task that requires detailed up-to-date information. At the same time, it has to be carried out quickly. The authors propose supporting medical staff with an IT system. The proposed system could be used in cases of mass incidents, as it is problematic, but essential, to provide all injured with adequate healthcare as fast as possible. The contribution is a system based on business rules, which is a novel approach in this context. Its feasibility is proven by prototypic implementation. In this paper, the authors describe the development project’s background as well as the system’s requirements and implementation details. The authors present an exemplary scenario to show the strengths of the proposed approach.

Experience Report

The events of September 11, 2001, the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 awakened American policymakers to the importance of the need for emergency management. This paper explains how a cloud computing environment can support social networks and logistical coordination on a global scale during crises. Basic cloud computing functionality is covered to show how social networks can connect seamlessly to work together with profound interoperability. Lastly, the benefits of a cloud computing solution is presented as the most cost-effective, efficient, and secure method of communication during a disaster response, with the unique capability of being able to support a global community through its massive scalability.

Evaluating Campus Safety Messages at 99 Public Universities in 2010

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Education published an Action Guide for Emergency Management at Institutions of Higher Education (U.S. Department of Education, 2009). In 2006, the Virginia State Crime Commission issued a prescient “Final Report: Study on Campus Safety (HJR 122)” regarding Virginia’s colleges and universities (Virginia State Crime Commission, 2006). Gray (2009) provided results from a “Columbine 10-Year Anniversary Survey”, which reviewed recent campus safety improvements of 435 K-12 and university respondents. From the three documents, prescribed campus safety activities were identified that could be consistently found in the stated programs and policies on university websites. Of these activities, 18 separate criteria upon which a university’s online emergency preparedness/safety/security messages could be evaluated through content analysis were conceptualized (coding: 1= school has criterion, 0= does not), to estimate the quality of the overall preparedness message of each institution in the small sample (n = 99) of universities, representing all 50 states in 2010.

Knowledge-Based Issues for Aid Agencies in Crisis Scenarios

As part of its expanding role, particularly as an agent of peace building, the United Nations (UN) actively participates in the implementation of measures to prevent and manage crisis/disaster situations. The purpose of such an approach is to empower the victims, protect the environment, rebuild communities, and create employment. However, real world crisis management situations are complex given the multiple interrelated interests, actors, relations, and objectives. Recent studies in healthcare contexts, which also have dynamic and complex operations, have shown the merit and benefits of employing various tools and techniques from the domain of knowledge management (KM). Hence, this paper investigates three distinct natural crisis situations (the 2010 Haiti Earthquake, the 2004 Boxing Day Asian Tsunami, and the 2001 Gujarat Earthquake) with which the United Nations and international aid agencies have been and are currently involved, to identify recurring issues which continue to provide knowledge-based impediments. Major findings from each case study are analyzed according to the estimated impact of identified impediments. The severity of the enumerated knowledge-based issues is quantified and compared by means of an assigned qualitative to identify the most significant attribute.

Exercise24

Can populations self organize a crisis response? This is a field report on the first two efforts in a continuing series of exercises termed “Exercise24 or x24.” The first Exercise 24 focused on Southern California, while the second (24 Europe) focused on the Balkan area of Eastern Europe. These exercises attempted to demonstrate that self-organizing groups can form and respond to a crisis using low-cost social media and other emerging web technologies. Over 10,000 people participated in X24 while X24 Europe had over 49,000 participants. X24 involved people from 79 nations while X24 Europe officially included participants from at least 92 countries. Exercise24 was organized by a team of workers centered at the SDSU Viz Center including significant support from the US Navy as well as other military and Federal organizations. Dr. George Bressler, Adjunct Faculty member at the Viz Center led both efforts. Major efforts from senior professionals EUCOM and NORTHCOM contributed significantly to the preparation for and success of both X24 and especially X24 Europe. This paper presents lessons learned and other experiences gained through the coordination and performance of Exercise24.

Mining Geospatial Knowledge on the Social Web

Up-to-date geospatial information can help crisis management community to coordinate its response. In addition to data that is created and curated by experts, there is an abundance of user-generated, user-curated data on Social Web sites such as Flickr, Twitter, and Google Earth. User-generated data and metadata can be used to harvest knowledge, including geospatial knowledge that will help solve real-world problems including information discovery, geospatial information integration and data management. This paper proposes a method for acquiring geospatial knowledge in the form of places and relations between them from the user-generated data and metadata on the Social Web. The key to acquiring geospatial knowledge from social metadata is the ability to accurately represent places. The authors describe a simple, efficient algorithm for finding a non-convex boundary of a region from a sample of points from that region. Used within a procedure that learns part-of relations between places from real-world data extracted from the social photo-sharing site Flickr, the proposed algorithm leads to more precise relations than the earlier method and helps uncover knowledge not contained in expert-curated geospatial knowledge bases.

Emergency Management, Twitter, and Social Media Evangelism

This paper considers how emergency response organizations utilize available social media technologies to communicate with the public in emergencies and to potentially collect valuable information using the public as sources of information on the ground. The authors discuss the use of public social media tools from the emergency management professional’s viewpoint with a particular focus on the use of Twitter. Limited research has investigated Twitter usage in crisis situations from an organizational perspective. This paper contributes to the understanding of organizational innovation, risk communication, and technology adoption by emergency management. An in-depth longitudinal case study of Public Information Officers (PIO) of the Los Angeles Fire Department highlights the importance of the information evangelist within emergency management organizations and details the challenges those organizations face engaging with social media and Twitter. This article provides insights into practices and challenges of new media implementation for crisis and risk management organizations.