Electronic Checklist Support for Disaster Response

Sensors

Preparing a plan for reaction to a grave emergency is a significant first stage in disaster management. A group of experts can do such preparation. Best results are obtained with group members having diverse backgrounds and access to different relevant data. The output of this stage should be a plan as comprehensive as possible, taking into account various perspectives. The group can organize itself as a collaborative decision-making team with a process cycle involving modeling the process, defining the objectives of the decision outcome, gathering data, generating options and evaluating them according to the defined objectives. The meeting participants may have their own evidences concerning people’s location at the beginning of the emergency and assumptions about people’s reactions once it occurs. Geographical information is typically crucial for the plan, because the plan must be based on the location of the safe areas, the distances to move people, the connecting roads or other ...

… , IEEE Transactions on, 1998

This paper outlines the main features of an electronic communication system, MMS, designed to support coordination and exchange of information in connection with emergency management (EM) efforts. The design of the MMS has been motivated by interviews with EM decision makers and reviews of communication and coordination problems observed during EM efforts and exercises. The system involves the use of a small set of message types designed to match the main categories of acts of communication in the domain of EM. Message tokens related to a sequence of message transactions can be linked, and links among messages can be viewed in a graphic tree-like display. By employing the extensive filtration facilities offered by the MMS, users are able to monitor the current status of messages. And, in general, filtration provides users with means of surveying a possibly large number of responses to messages. Thus, users are able to define filters that capture, for instance, "unanswered requests sent out by me today" or "requests from me that have not been answered by an unconditional 'OK.'" Last, we describe an associated preparedness plan module, which contains, for a given EM organization, its contingency plan and procedures to be applied during predefined stages of an emergency.

Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, 2005., 2005

An emergency response activiv usual& involves several teams from different organizations working cooperatively for the purpose of saving lives or properties. These teams have to make many decisiom under time pressure to accomplish their goals. Most decisions require confextual knowledge coming ffom the' emergency settings, including those which report the activities of other emergency teams. The goal of this paper is to describe a system which aims at storing and disseminating the contextual knowledge required by teams during the course of an emergency.

Emergency situations call for the timely collaboration and error free communication of first responder (FR) teams from their Command Posts (CP) and between themselves. First responder teams must form and adapt their plans and actions as a real-time critical situation unfolds. This paper presents an advanced Command Post application that manages a diversity of FR teams during an emergency. Data from biometric, fire and/or gas sensors in addition to received annotated videos from first responders on site, carrying personal digital assistants (PDAs), are simultaneously managed. The presented system provides properly configured access to and alertdependent visualization of real time location, biometric, gas, fire and annotated video data from FRs in the field to allow for effective reaction and decision support from CP personnel. Additionally, the system forms an information management system for all necessary information to be quickly handy during emergency handling, such as FR information, critical infrastructure information, historical information, etc. This system has been validated through qualitative analysis in a field trial at the M30 tunnel in Madrid by participating end users.

Information Systems and e-Business Management, 2008

Emergency situations occur unpredictably and cause individuals and organizations to shift their focus and attention immediately to deal with the situation. When disasters become large scale, all the limitations resulting from a lack of integration and collaboration among all the involved organizations begin to be exposed and further compound the negative consequences of the event. Often in large-scale disasters the people who must work together have no history of doing so; they have not developed a trust or understanding of one another's abilities, and the totality of resources they each bring to bear have never before been exercised. As a result, the challenges for individual or group decision support systems (DSS) in emergency situations are diverse and immense. In this contribution, we present recent advances in this area and highlight important challenges that remain.

2010

Handling highly dynamic scenarios as they arise in mass casualty incident (MCI) situations requires lots of information about the situation and an extremely flexible IT infrastructure that can assist in managing the incident. We show a combination of technologies from different fields of research that have focused on the support of the strategic and tactical level in such situations. We describe the core of the SPEEDUP architecture where a planner, a service manager, and an agent-based middleware together support operations managers in an MCI.

2012

dpsd04032 {moulianitis; dlek; kgp} @ syros.aegean.gr Abstract. The paper is concerned with the design of a DSS (Decision Support System) for the Hellenic Center of Emergency Response (EKAB) based on information systems. The system will gather information from different sources, combining and displaying them in different terminals and user interfaces in the coordination centre at EKAB, the departments of urgent incidents at hospitals and ambulances and on handheld devices. The proposed DSS aims to decrease time of correspondence of ambulances, improve the conditions of work in EKAB, address the pointless use of some official resources, and in general to enhance the quality of service that EKAB offers to all citizens. A first final prototype application has been delivered to the operators of EKAB for trial and has created quite positive responses.

2016

Emergency decision makers face a challenge taking rapid and high-risk decisions during an emergency situation, especially when the emergency is cross-border and requires multi-agency cooperation. The emergency decision makers use emergency management (EM) system and sometimes decision support systems (DSS) when responding to a crisis. To date the emergency decision makers have not had access to a system that supports them in all facets of the full EM cycle. This paper describes work in progress designing and building a comprehensive system of systems that intend to be that support for emergency decision makers. The system has successfully demonstrated its value from a technical and user perspective. Future tests will demonstrate if it will enhance decision management in reality-based emergency scenarios.