Emergency Management Domain Research Articles

Ready or not? The state of emergency preparedness among Italian Public Health medical residents

Abstract Background Italy frequently experiences major events like earthquakes, floods, and migrant shipwrecks, reflecting global concerns that also include climate change, pandemics, and wars. This study aims to assess the role of public health experts and the current state of Italian post-degree Public Health schools in addressing these challenges. Methods In June 2023, a cross-sectional online survey was administered to all Italian Public Health residents enrolled in the Italian Society of Hygiene, Preventive Medicine, and Public Health (SItI). The survey investigated the availability and frequency of training and updates related to emergencies, measured the interest and perceived importance of these topics among residents, examined the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their awareness, and identified their primary sources of information in the subject. Results Out of 289 respondents, a significant majority (86.2%) acknowledging the importance of being trained in emergency management and 74.4% expressed interest in topic (p < 0.001). A 90.1% of residents indicated a lack of dedicated courses and 93.1% reported an absence of specialized master’s programs (p < 0.001). There was a strong correlation between recognizing the importance of the topic and the desire to attend specialized conferences (p < 0.001). The COVID-19 pandemic had a noticeable impact: 24.6% recognized the importance of the topic pre-pandemic, while 50.9% raised awareness during (p < 0.001). Conclusions The findings highlight a critical gap in the training of public health professionals in Italy, particularly in the domain of emergency preparedness and management. There is a pressing need to establish enhanced, uniform training programs across different public health training networks in Italy. Implementing such programs would ensure a more robust and effective response to future emergencies, thereby safeguarding public health and improving outcomes during crises. Key messages • Significant gap in specialized training and awareness among health professionals. • Urgent need for emergency preparedness training in public health.

Vision for Emergency Management: Conceptualizing Mission-Critical Ecosystems

Emergency management is seldom viewed through the lens of enterprises/industries, which aim to safeguard their critical missions to deliver seamless services. This article advocates for an integrative perspective on mission-critical (eco)systems. In the digital transformation landscape, the traditional notions of "mission-critical systems," often associated with physical spaces like control facilities or hardware-software crucial for business operations, are challenged. Based on document reviews, this article argues for a holistic comprehension of an organization's mission-critical ecosystems, considering internal and external factors across physical, digital, and human aspects. The article uses renewable energy and e-health as cases. The overarching goal is to expand the research scope in emergency management by examining current concerns and current trends in emergency management domain, combining preparedness, resilience, and cybersecurity. This comprehensive approach aims to enhance our ability to navigate and respond effectively to emergencies in an increasingly complex and interconnected world.

Research on Modeling Methods of Model-Driven Emergency Management Domain

This paper started with the software design method of emergency management domain, analyzed the shortcomings of traditional model-driven modeling methods, and then led to the model design method of emergency management domain, and introduced the advantages of model-driven design of emergency management domain.

A Decision Support Model for Improvement of Urban Resilience through Accessibility Analysis

Decision support systems provide vital benefits supplying additional information before planning in disaster management. To improve a city's resilience against disasters such organization and maintenance must be conducted during the city planning stage. In this work, an improvement suggestion mechanism is built using risk value estimation through availability of emergency centers and road network redundancy is provided. This approach investigates the study area to determine possible risk zones within the city using routing and road network analysis. Upon investigation of the necessary parameters, a risk value is calculated for each administrative division within a city. These risk values are then passed to the decision support stage in which the system can pick one or several items from a list of improvements to reduce overall riskiness of these divisions. This work combines several ideas of emergency management domain in a formula to provide a quantitative meaning to possible risk within administrative divisions. Decision support aspect can be customized further to help planners have a preliminary analysis by showing the optimal locations to place new emergency management facilities.

Decision Support for Plan Adaptation in Unforeseen Situations

Handling irregular phenomena might bring great complexity for involved teams. Variables considered for undertaking recommended procedures may yield many decision alternatives, challenging to deal with at planning time. Additionally, expectations regarding the phenomena handling may not match those observed. This means that the existing plan’s application may become inappropriate, and teams must be creative in performing actions and decision-making. An approach for on-the-fly adaptation of plans aims to assist teams in identifying and diagnosing unforeseen situations, besides adjusting previously developed plans at runtime. This approach was evaluated through experiments in the emergency management domain, and the initial results indicate its feasibility in dealing with unforeseen situations while handling irregular phenomena in complex environments.

CIME: Context-aware geolocation of emergency-related posts

Information extracted from social media has proven to be very useful in the domain of emergency management. An important task in emergency management is rapid crisis mapping, which aims to produce timely and reliable maps of affected areas. During an emergency, the volume of emergency-related posts is typically large, but only a small fraction is relevant and help rapid mapping effectively. Furthermore, posts are not useful for mapping purposes unless they are correctly geolocated and, on average, less than 2% of posts are natively georeferenced. This paper presents an algorithm, called CIME, that aims to identify and geolocate emergency-related posts that are relevant for mapping purposes. While native geocoordinates are most often missing, many posts contain geographical references in their metadata, such as texts or links that can be used by CIME to filter and geolocate information. In addition, social media creates a social network and each post can be enhanced with indirect information from the post’s network of relationships with other posts (for example, a retweet can be associated with other geographical references which are useful to geolocate the original tweet). To exploit all this information, CIME uses the concept of context, defined as the information characterizing a post both directly (the post’s metadata) and indirectly (the post’s network of relationships). The algorithm was evaluated on a recent major emergency event demonstrating better performance with respect to the state of the art in terms of total number of geolocated posts, geolocation accuracy and relevance for rapid mapping.

A Scoping Review on Agency Collaboration in Emergency Management Based on the 3C Model

Most emergency responses involve collaborative efforts from teams operating in the field and in the backstage. Collaboration within and across agencies should therefore be regarded as an essential service in emergency management. We propose a conceptual lens to analyse the technological support to collaboration services in emergency management. The proposed lens is based on the 3C Model, which regards collaboration services as the articulation and composition of three other services: communication, coordination and cooperation. Using this lens, we conduct a scoping literature review of the emergency management domain. The review contributes to better understand the relationships between collaboration services and technology support in emergency management.

Designing an Emergency Management Simulation Testbed to Investigate Incident Management Team Performance

Investigating real-life disasters and crises has been challenging due to accompanying difficulties and risks posed by these complex phenomena. Previous research in the emergency management domain has largely relied on qualitative approaches to describe the event after it occurred. To facilitate investigations for more generalizable findings, this paper documents ongoing efforts to design an emergency management simulation testbed called Team Emergency Operations Simulation (TEOS) in which an incident management team (IMT) is situated. First, we describe the design process based on our previous work. Next, we present the overall description of TEOS including representative roles, tasks, and team environments. We also propose measures of team performance of the IMT and propose future research that can be realized through TEOS.

Universal Design of ICT for Emergency Management from Stakeholders\u2019 Perspective

While Universal Design principles have been adopted in many areas to ensure that products and services are usable for the broadest possible diversity of users, there is still an open area when it comes to the emergency management domain. This article aims at providing a systematic overview of the current state of the emerging research field of Universal Design of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for Emergency Management, and to highlight high-impact research opportunities to ensure that the increasing introduction of ICT in Emergency Management can contribute to removing barriers instead of adding more barriers, in particular for the elderly and people with disabilities. A systematic review on relevant literature on Universal Design, ICT and Emergency Management between 2008 and 2020 was employed using predefined frameworks, to answer the following questions: (1) Who are the target audiences (stakeholders) in research on Universal Design of ICT in Emergency Management in the different categories of Emergency Management ICT tools, and to what degree is Human-Centred Design and Universal Design taken into account? (2) What are the most important challenges and gaps in research on Universal Design of ICT in Emergency Management? We identify a set of gaps in the literature, indicating that there are some challenges where Universal Design is still limitedly addressed in technology development. We also derive promising future research topics based on areas that are missing in the literature.

Cyber-mitigation: Cybersecurity emergency management.

Cybersecurity is within the realm of emergency management, as cyber-attacks can generate both virtual and real world issues that emergency responders may be called upon to deal with. However, it has a skillset and other characteristics that are distinct from the types of emergency management that most practitioners commonly-and are prepared-to deal with. This paper compares the two disciplines, discusses areas where cybersecurity professionals and researchers can learn from the emergency management discipline and proposes new research directions within the emergency management domain.

VOST: A case study in voluntary digital participation for collaborative emergency management

Virtual Operations Support Teams (VOSTs) are a novel form of organized intelligence-gathering effort that has recently appeared in the emergency management and disaster response domain. Using novel organizational strategies and advanced algorithmic tools, such teams are set up to master the challenge of data overload and to turn it into increased situational awareness for decision-makers. This paper contains an analysis of the structural, procedural and technical requirements of VOSTs for the collaborative deployment with emergency management agencies during the Grand Départ of the Tour de France 2017 in Düsseldorf. We had the unique opportunity to participate in the creation and initial deployments of a VOST, a new team assembled by the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW). Based on our observations we will provide a structured investigation into the various tasks of a VOST, such as social media monitoring, information verification, and crisis mapping. Due to the specific nature of the challenges faced by a VOST, which inherently involve big data processing, we will discuss the technical requirements and future prospects of data mining tools developed for and employed within this context.

A multi-UAV cooperative route planning methodology for 3D fine-resolution building model reconstruction

In order to provide a fast multi-UAV cooperative data acquisition approach for 3D building model reconstruction in emergency management domain, a route planning methodology is proposed. A minimum image set including camera shooting positions and attitudes can be firstly obtained, with the given parameters describing the target building, UAVs, cameras, and image overlap requirements. A specific flight route network is then determined, and the optimal solution for multi-UAV data capture route planning is computed on the basis of constraint conditions such as the time frame, UAV battery endurance, and take-off and landing positions. Furthermore, field experiments with manual operating UAV mode, single UAV mode, and multi-UAV mode were conducted to compare the data collection and processing runtimes, as well as the quality of created 3D building models. According to the five defined LoDs of OGC CityGML 2.0 standard, the fine 3D building models conform to the LoD3. Comparison results demonstrate that our method is able to greatly enhance the efficiency of 3D reconstruction by improving the data collection speed while minimizing redundant image datasets, as well as to provide a normalized approach to assign the single or multi-UAV data acquisition tasks. The quality analysis of 3D models shows that the metric difference is less than 20 cm mean error with a standard deviation of 11 cm, which is fairly acceptable in emergency management study field. A 3D GIS-based software demo was also implemented to enable route planning, flight simulation, and data collection visualization.

Intelligent Process Adaptation in the SmartPM System

The increasing application of process-oriented approaches in new challenging dynamic domains beyond business computing (e.g., healthcare, emergency management, factories of the future, home automation, etc.) has led to reconsider the level of flexibility and support required to manage complex knowledge-intensive processes in such domains. A knowledge-intensive process is influenced by user decision making and coupled with contextual data and knowledge production, and involves performing complex tasks in the “physical” real world to achieve a common goal. The physical world, however, is not entirely predictable, and knowledge-intensive processes must be robust to unexpected conditions and adaptable to unanticipated exceptions, recognizing that in real-world environments it is not adequate to assume that all possible recovery activities can be predefined for dealing with the exceptions that can ensue. To tackle this issue, in this paper we present SmartPM, a model and a prototype Process Management System featuring a set of techniques providing support for automated adaptation of knowledge-intensive processes at runtime. Such techniques are able to automatically adapt process instances when unanticipated exceptions occur, without explicitly defining policies to recover from exceptions and without the intervention of domain experts at runtime, aiming at reducing error-prone and costly manual ad-hoc changes, and thus at relieving users from complex adaptations tasks. To accomplish this, we make use of well-established techniques and frameworks from Artificial Intelligence, such as situation calculus, IndiGolog and classical planning. The approach, which is backed by a formal model, has been implemented and validated with a case study based on real knowledge-intensive processes coming from an emergency management domain.

The Formation of Transnational Knowledge Networks on Social Media

ABSTRACTTransnational knowledge networks provide organizations with information useful in addressing shared problems. Social media may enable the formation of those networks, yet their role in the process has received little attention. This article examines the structure and antecedents of two networks facilitated by the microblogging platform Twitter operating in the policy domain of emergency management. One network includes national-level government agencies responsible for disaster response and recovery operations; the other includes nongovernmental organizations in the form of Red Cross and Red Crescent national societies. We use a logistic regression quadratic assignment procedure to test hypotheses derived from related literature. While findings indicate that shared language and geographic proximity shaped network formation, both networks exhibit boundary spanning behavior in which organizations sought out information from high-profile, resource-rich organizations. Those organizations helped to connect otherwise regionally bound clusters and demonstrate the nascent potential of social media to create global transnational knowledge networks.

Training emergency responders through augmented reality mobile interfaces

In the domain of emergency management, in addition to the constant technical skill-upgrade required by the nature of the humanitarian context, the importance of an appropriate training is widely recognized. In particular, giving responders information technology skills so that they are well prepared to address health, security and managerial concerns represents a key factor by which the goal of an efficient and effective humanitarian emergency response can be pursued. In this paper we propose the adoption of augmented reality mobile interfaces to enhance the training efficacy for on-site crisis preparedness activities. The system we propose originated from the idea to allow trainees to exploit Augmented Reality (AR) interaction and become quickly familiar with the mobile technology adopted today in emergency response activities.

Crisis Crowdsourcing Framework: Designing Strategic Configurations of Crowdsourcing for the Emergency Management Domain

Crowdsourcing is not a new practice but it is a concept that has gained substantial attention during recent disasters. Drawing from previous work in the crisis informatics, disaster sociology, and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) literature, this paper first explains recent conceptualizations of crowdsourcing and how crowdsourcing is a way of leveraging disaster convergence. The CSCW concept of "articulation work" is introduced as an interpretive frame for extracting the salient dimensions of "crisis crowdsourcing." Then, a series of vignettes are presented to illustrate the evolution of crisis crowdsourcing that spontaneously emerged after the 2010 Haiti earthquake and evolved to more established forms of public engagement during crises. The best practices extracted from the vignettes clarified the efforts to formalize crisis crowdsourcing through the development of innovative interfaces designed to support the articulation work needed to facilitate spontaneous volunteer efforts. Extracting these best practices led to the development of a conceptual framework that unpacks the key dimensions of crisis crowdsourcing. The Crisis Crowdsourcing Framework is a systematic, problem-driven approach to determining the why, who, what, when, where, and how aspects of a crowdsourcing system. The framework also draws attention to the social, technological, organizational, and policy (STOP) interfaces that need to be designed to manage the articulation work involved with reducing the complexity of coordinating across these key dimensions. An example of how to apply the framework to design a crowdsourcing system is offered with a discussion on the implications for applying this framework as well as the limitations of this framework. Innovation is occurring at the social, technological, organizational, and policy interfaces enabling crowdsourcing to be operationalized and integrated into official products and services.

Self-organisation of resources of smart environment with the object of joint activities.

A framework for self-organisation of resources of a smart environment, service-oriented architecture, and a protocol for the resource self-organisation are described in the paper. The resources of the smart environment self-organise for the purpose of taking joint resource actions on assisting people involved in a situation that takes place in the environment. The resources are represented by means of Web-services. Due to such a representation the resource self-organisation is replaced with the self-organisation of the Web-services. Main research points are illustrated by examples from the emergency management domain.

High Impact/Low Frequency Extreme Events: Enabling Reflection and Resilience in a Hyper-connected World

Helbing (2013:51) poignantly argues that ‘Globalization and technological revolutions are changing our planet’. Along with the benefits and opportunities associated with worldwide collaboration networks comes ‘pathways along which dangerous and damaging events can spread rapidly and globally’. With our hyper-connected world underpinned by hyper or hybrid-risks, the impact of unexpected events such as floods, earthquakes, financial crisis, and cyber-attacks has revealed the fragility and vulnerabilities that lie within the social/technological/economic/political/ecological interdependent systems. In particular, events that affect critical infrastructure such as damage to electric power, telecommunications, transportation, health care systems, financial markets and water-supply systems can have local, regional and global impact. Taleb (2007) calls these extreme events ‘Black swans’ to describe their inherent quality of surprise. Many of the systemic risks that characterize Natural Hazard triggered Technological disasters (NATECH) often arise from unanticipated consequences of interactions within and between different types of systems. Johnson and Tivnan (2012:65) argue that, ‘…understanding, controlling and predicting extreme behavior [of NATECH] is an important strategic goal to support resilience planning’. In this light, a new paradigm is required to support disaster risk reduction (DRR) embedded in hyper-risks; one that will develop not only anticipatory measures for risk management but also prepare for the unpredictable and the ‘unknown’ by building organisational resilience for hyper-risks in general and NATECH disasters in particular. In this paper we explore the emergency management domain associated with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident to show the hyper-connectivity and hyper-risks that permeated the problem space and thereby show how ‘reflective responses’ underpinned by ‘critical reflective practices’ can be used to support resilience in such a complex disaster.

Social acceptance of location-based mobile government services for emergency management

Location-based services deployed by governments can be used to assist people manage emergencies via their mobile handsets. Research delineating the acceptance of public services in the domain of emergency management has been scantly investigated in information systems. The main aim of this study is to assess the viability of location-based mobile emergency services by: (i) exploring the issues related to location-based services and their nationwide utilisation for emergency management; (ii) investigating the attitudinal and behavioural implications of the services; and (iii) examining the social acceptance or rejection of the services and identify the determinants of this acceptance or rejection. The results reveal that both attitude and perceived usefulness demonstrate a good prediction power of behavioural intention. Although perceived ease of use was found not to be a predictor of attitude, the results affirm its influence on perceived usefulness. The results also demonstrate the role of trust as the most influential determinant of individual perception of the usefulness of the services. Further, the results indicate that only the collection of personal location information, as a perceived privacy concern, had a significant negative impact on trust. Implications and future research are also discussed.

Crafting Requirements for Mobile and Pervasive Emergency Response based on Privacy and Security by Design Principles

According to fundamental principles of the Privacy by Design approach, the consultation of privacy issues should be embedded into analysis and design of information systems, from the early stages of system planning to implementation. In this article, the authors extend this perspective towards Privacy and Security by Design. Exemplary focusing on mobile and pervasive emergency response, as a specific area of the emergency management domain, this article conveys how the early requirements elicitation can be supported by a semantically integrated conceptual modeling method. Presenting the results of the exemplary executed elicitation processes, it contributes a concrete set of security and privacy requirements for mobile and pervasive emergency response settings. By also taking into account conflicting security goals, this article provides a substantial grounding for the development and deployment of multilaterally secure pervasive ICT that effectively supports emergency management during and in the aftermath of critical response missions.