Search results

Under uncertain circumstances, digital technologies are taken as digital transformation enablers and driving forces to integrate with medical, healthcare and emergency management research for effective epidemic prevention and control. This study aims to adapt complex systems in emergency management. Thus, a digital transformation-driven and systematic circulation framework is proposed in this study that can utilize the advantages of digital technologies to generate innovative and systematic governance.

Aiming at adapting complex systems in emergency management, a systematic circulation framework based on the interpretive research is proposed in this study that can utilize the advantages of digital technologies to generate innovative and systematic governance. The framework consists of four phases: (1) analysis of emergency management stages, (2) risk identification in the emergency management stages, (3) digital-enabled response model design for emergency management, and (4) strategy generation for digital emergency governance. A case study in China was illustrated in this study.

This paper examines the role those digital technologies can play in responding to pandemics and outlines a framework based on four phases of digital technologies for pandemic responses. After the phase-by-phase analysis, a digital technology-enabled emergency management framework, titled “Expected digital-enabled emergency management framework (EDEM framework)” was adapted and proposed. Moreover, the social risks of emergency management phases are identified. Then, three strategies for emergency governance and digital governance from the three perspectives, namely “Strengthening weaknesses for emergency response,” “Enhancing integration for collaborative governance,” and “Engaging foundations for emergency management” that the government can adopt them in the future, fight for public health emergency events.

The novel digital transformation-driven systematic circulation framework for public health risk response and governance was proposed. Meanwhile, an “Expected digital-enabled emergency management framework (EDEM model)” was also proposed to achieve a more effective empirical response for public health risk response and governance and contribute to studies about the government facing the COVID-19 pandemic effectively.

This work aims at developing guidelines and methods for establishing urban hazard information infrastructure (UHII) for the City of Windhoek (CoW) in Namibia, to set up an institutional and technical framework for spatial data exchange and sharing in development control and hazard management. An analysis of UHII requirements in the Twente Fire Brigades (The Netherlands) was first conducted and the Spatial Information Management Reference Model (RSIMM) was created. RSIMM was used as a reference to the Case‐Specific Spatial Information Management Model (CSIMM) for the CoW, where young institutions face financial, structural, legal and technical uncertainties. The new methodology to introduce UHII to the CoW was developed using combined soft and structured system development methods. The policies and strategies supporting UHII development were identified. The Urban Hazard and Emergency Management Information System (UHEMIS) development was chosen to initiate UHII introduction creating data and metadata management base for decision making in spatial development control, risk assessment and emergency response planning. The UHII and UHEMIS models are being designed next in this on‐going research.

This paper uses a cognitive analytics management approach to analyze, understand and solve the problems facing the implementation of information systems and help management do the needed changes to enhance such a critical process; the emergency management system in the health industry is analyzed as a case study.

Cognitive analytics management (CAM) framework (Osman and Anouz, 2014) is used. Cognitive process: The right questions are asked to understand the behavior of every process and the flow of its corresponding data; critical data variables were identified, guidelines for identifying data sources were set. Analytics process: Techniques of data analytics were applied to the selected data sets, problems were identified in user–system interaction and in the system design. The analysis process helped the management in the management process to make right decisions for the right change.

Using the CAM framework, the analysis to the Lebanese Red Cross case study identified system user-behavior problems and also system design problems. It identified cases where distributed subsystems are vulnerable to time keeping errors and helped the management make knowledgeable decisions to overcome major obstacles by implementing several changes related to hardware design, software implementation, human resource training, operational and human-technology changes. CAM is a novel and feasible software engineering approach for handling system failures.

The paper uses CAM framework as an approach to overcome system failures and help management do the needed changes to enhance such a critical process. This work contributes to the software engineering literature by introducing CAM as a new agile methodology to be used when dealing with system failures. Furthermore, this study is an action research that validated the CAM theoretical framework in a health emergency context in Lebanon.

Based on the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), the territorial public emergency supplies will be networked, platform-based management, unified emergency dispatch. The problem of supplies dispatching in the “last kilometer” of emergency is solved, and the supplies needed in the disaster area are promptly delivered to the hands of the victims so that they can quickly be rescued after the disaster and to save valuable time for rapid rescue, which can greatly decrease casualties and property losses. This paper aims to discuss these issues.

By analyzing the shortage of existing emergency supplies dispatching research and taking all factors such as disaster area demand, social reserve, road conditions, mode of transport, loading limit, disaster area satisfaction rate and road capacity into consideration under the background of IoT, a variety of the territorial emergency supplies dispatching model with more rescue points, more affected areas are constructed. The objective function of the model is to aim in finding the shortest rescue time, giving the solution algorithm, and finally simulating the simulation case.

Based on the context of the IoT, the territorial public emergency supplies will be networked, platform-based management, unified emergency dispatch. Considering factors such as road conditions, modes of transport and road capacity, the authors construct a number of emergency rescue plans, multiple disaster scenarios and various emergency supplies dispatching models. The authors simulate the situation through simulation cases with the shortest time being the ultimate goal. The problem of supplies dispatching in the “last kilometer” of emergency is solved, and the supplies needed in the disaster area are promptly delivered to the hands of the victims so that they can quickly be rescued after the disaster and to save valuable time for rapid rescue, which can greatly decrease casualties and property losses.

This paper provides little research on the dispatch of emergency supplies. The problems of direct dispatch from the rescue point to the affected area and dispatch of supplies without relying on the arrival of emergency supplies at the rear are addressed. Therefore, this study does not focus on the arrival of emergency supplies at the rear but on direct dispatching issues during territorial public emergency supplies from the rescue point to the disaster point.

Carries a review and critique on technology transfer applications to the management of man‐made type disasters. Covers state‐of‐the‐art applications of quality, risk and safety techniques. Quality function deployment (QFD), management overview risk tree (MORT), failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), digraph and fault tree analysis (FTA), advanced mathematical modelling (simulation), decision support systems’ artificial intelligence (AI), object‐oriented programming (OOP) and innovative training methods (hyper and multimedia) to disaster prevention and limitation. Also reviews recent technology transfer projects in chemical, nuclear and transport applications and demonstrates that these projects can play, and have already played, a major role in improving techni cally and scientifically all aspects of disaster management. For completeness, also provides a listing of selected sites on the so‐called Super Highway which contain a wide spectrum of information relating to disaster prevention and limitation.

Telephone calls are the predominant telecommunication mode in Sri Lanka. Consequently, leveraging voice-based applications for disaster communication would be acceptable and sustainable. The purpose of this paper is to realise the design requirements for an integrated voice-enabled alerting and reporting system, and then to use the lessons learned to influence disaster management researchers, practitioners and developers to invest resources in related new system developments.

The findings in this paper are from an experiment concerning interactive voice for connecting community-based emergency field operatives with their central co-ordination hub.

A particular challenge was in interchanging Sinhala and Tamil language speech data, generated by the Freedom Fone Interactive Voice Response, with the text-based “Sahana” disaster-management system for analysis and decision support. The Emergency Data Exchange Language interoperable content standard was adopted for mediation between the two disparate systems. Standard mobile phones were the interface linking the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) members. Low quality voice transmissions over the GSM cellular infrastructure resulted in distorted data. This shortcoming was a barrier to automating transformations between text and speech.

Replacing those processes with human procedure significantly degrades their reliability. Nevertheless, the CERT members find voice-enabled information exchange useful and easy to use, because it diminishes the need for computer literacy and removes language barriers. The paper discusses the utility evaluation of the introduced system.

Computer‐aided decision‐support tools are part and parcel of the emergency planning and management process today. Much is dependent on using modern technology to gather and analyse data on damage assessment, meteorology, demography, etc. and provide decision support for prevention/mitigation, response and recovery. Diverse technologies are merged to provide useful functions to aid the emergency planner/manager. Complexities arise when attempting to link several streams of technology to achieve a realistic, usable and reliable decision‐support tool. This discussion identifies and analyses the challenging issues faced in linking two technologies: simulation modelling and GIS, to design spatial decision‐support systems for evacuation planing. Experiences in designing CEMPS, a prototype designed for area evacuation planning, are drawn on to discuss relevant managerial, behavioural, processual and technical issues. Focus is placed on modelling evacuee behaviour, generating realistic scenarios, validation, logistics, etc. while also investigating future trends and developments.

The frequent occurrence of emergencies and disasters continues to threaten community safety and security. Emergency communications and warning systems (ECWS) allow people to make decisions and take actions before, during and after the emergency or disaster. The critical objective of this study is to determine the critical capacities of ECWS in the Australian context.

This study used stakeholder analysis in which written submissions from individuals, and public and private organizations collected by the Australian federal government were subjected to structured coding techniques in order to identify major ECWS capacity issues. The summary of findings were generating by axially collapsing and summarizing the coded statements.

Findings showed that a broad range of ECWS are deployed in the Australian context. These ECWS come with social and/or technical limitations that suggest the importance of adopting an integrated or systems based approach for their construction and deployment. Also, while the identification of critical infrastructure vulnerabilities reinforced the argument for an integrated systems approach for ECWS, this also demonstrated the pressing need to build resilience and redundancy into domestic infrastructure networks. In addition, new and innovative ECWS technologies and solutions will enable improved emergency or disaster management in the future.

This paper simultaneously considers important factors and issues impacting ECWS and provides an instructive discourse on the requirement for more combinative ECWS.

This paper aims to demonstrate how to make emergency decision when decision makers face a complex and turbulent environment that needs quite different decision-making processes from conventional ones. Traditional decision techniques cannot meet the demands of today’s social stability and security.

The main work is to develop an instance-driven classifier for the emergency categories based upon three fuzzy measures: features for an instance, solution for the instance and effect evaluation of the outcome. First, the information collected from the past emergency events is encodes into a prototype model. Second, a three-dimensional space that describes the locations and mutual distance relationships of the emergency events in different emergency prototypes is formulated. Third, for any new emergency event to be classified, the nearest emergency prototype is identified in the three-dimensional space and is classified into that category.

An instance-driven classifier based on prototype theory helps decision makers to describe emergency concept more clearly. The maximizing deviation model is constructed to determine the optimal relative weights of features according to the characteristics of the new instance, such that every customized feature space maximizes the influence of features shared by members of the category. Comparisons and discusses of the proposed method with other existing methods are given.

To reduce the affection to economic development, more and more countries have recognized the importance of emergency response solutions as an indispensable activity. In a new emergency instance, it is very challengeable for a decision maker to form a rational and feasible humanitarian aids scheme under the time pressure. After selecting a most suitable prototype, decision makers can learn most relevant experience and lessons in the emergency profile database and generate plan for the new instance. The proposed approach is to effectively make full use of inhomogeneous information in different types of resources and optimize resource allocation.

The combination of instances can reflect different aspects of a prototype. This feature solves the problem of insufficient learning data, which is a significant characteristic of emergency decision-making. It can be seen as a customized classification mechanism, while the previous classifiers always assume key features of a category.

The purpose of this study is to explore the applicability of analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to collective decision-making of local and state disaster managers for their efficient and effective allocation of limited financial resources.

For the implementation of AHP, this study conducted an AHP survey with state and local disaster managers in post-Katrina Louisiana, the USA.

The AHP analysis disclosed a preference gap between local and state managers. It also identified frequent interaction with partners, leadership and communication, as the most critical capabilities to develop for effective emergency management.

This study discussed the value of consistent and careful management of the collaborative relationship. This study is context-specific in disaster type (Hurricane) and locality (Louisiana). Other AHP studies or similar multi-criteria decision-making models should be implemented in different contexts.

Even with clear advantages of collective decision-making in the emergency management field, a model for collective decision-making has been rare. This study explored the applicability of AHP to the collective decision-making for the efficient and effective allocation of limited financial resources.