Emergency Management Information Research Articles

Data Integration Platform for Village Emergency

Emergency management information source is analyzed for rural China. Online processing (OLAP) is a new data analysis technique, which is described in detail for emergency services and can play a supporting role in the decision-making Meanwhile, village emergency services in the data subject has also been designed and made from forest fires as an example in detail. A multi-dimensional data set can be created based on the data source. Different cube should be built for different theme. And data cube comes from data warehouse not database. The ETL tool is developed based on SQL Server 2008 Integration Services API, by which data extraction, cleansing and loading can be completed.

Health Information and Communication System for Emergency Management in a Developing Country, Iran

Disasters are fortunately rare occurrences. However, accurate and timely information and communication are vital to adequately prepare individual health organizations for such events. The current article investigates the health related communication and information systems for emergency management in Iran. A mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology was used in this study. A sample of 230 health service managers was surveyed using a questionnaire and 65 semi-structured interviews were also conducted with public health and therapeutic affairs managers who were responsible for emergency management. A range of problems were identified including fragmentation of information, lack of local databases, lack of clear information strategy and lack of a formal system for logging disaster related information at regional or local level. Recommendations were made for improving the national emergency management information and communication system. The findings have implications for health organizations in developing and developed countries especially in the Middle East. Creating disaster related information databases, creating protocols and standards, setting an information strategy, training staff and hosting a center for information system in the Ministry of Health to centrally manage and share the data could improve the current information system.

Ideal location for flood shelter: a geographic information system approach

AbstractSpatial information for efficient flood emergency management is very limited in developing countries. This paper combines cartographic and remotely sensed data to identify the rural settlements that are vulnerable to flood in the Ajay River Basin of West Bengal, India. A European Remote Sensing Satellite‐1 synthetic aperture radar flood scene has been acquired over the Ajay River Basin. Several digital image processing techniques including thresholding have been applied to identify the flood‐affected settlements in the area. The principles of optimum location have been extensively applied through a geographic information system to come up with a map showing the ideal location for elevated concrete structures that can serve as flood shelter for vulnerable communities.

Simulation-Based Assessment of Vehicle Safety Behavior under Hazardous Driving Conditions

Future sustained economic growth of the nation very much depends on the reliability and efficiency of its highway infrastructure system. Some vehicles, such as trucks, emergency vehicles, and sport utility vehicles, often experience increasing risks of single-vehicle accidents under hazardous driving conditions, such as inclement weather and/or complicated topographical conditions. An advanced simulation-based single-vehicle accident assessment model is developed considering the coupling effects between vehicles and hazardous driving conditions, including wind gust, snow-covered or icy road surface, and/or curving. Compared to existing simulation models, the new model focuses on characterizing the transient process of accidents, introducing new critical variables on assessing the accident risks under more comprehensive hazardous driving conditions and establishing more realistic accident criteria. As a holistic deterministic model, it can be used to provide useful assessment and prevention information for traffic and emergency management. For example, it can be used to define appropriate safe driving speed limits for vulnerable vehicles under normal and extreme conditions and predict potential crash and injury risk of vulnerable drivers. Moreover, the new deterministic vehicle safety behavior simulation model lays a critical basis for future reliability-based studies of single-vehicle accident risks of vulnerable vehicles under hazardous conditions. After the model is introduced, numerical analyses on a typical truck under several representative hazardous scenarios will be conducted for demonstration purposes.

End-user oriented strategies to facilitate multi-organizational adoption of emergency management information systems

Response to large-scale emergencies is a cooperative process that requires the active and coordinated participation of a variety of functionally independent agencies operating in adjacent regions. In practice, this essential cooperation is sometimes not attained or is reduced due to poor information sharing, non-fluent communication flows, and lack of coordination. We report an empirical study of IT-mediated cooperation among Spanish response agencies and we describe the challenges of adoption, information sharing, communication flows, and coordination among agencies that do not share a unity of command. We analyze three strategies aimed at supporting acceptance and surmounting political, organizational and personal distrust or skepticism: participatory design, advanced collaborative tools inducing cognitive absorption, and end-user communities of practice.

Geographic information sharing: A regional approach in northern New Jersey, USA

The New Jersey Meadowlands Commission (NJMC) is a regional planning agency in northern New Jersey with jurisdiction over 14 municipalities. This case study describes a five year effort by this agency to serve geographic knowledge to 14 towns in the region by sharing resources and infrastructure through a centralized Geographical Information System (GIS). Serving this information required funding, convincing towns to participate, specialized staff, software licenses and equipment and follow-up with training and updates. The information being served consists of interactive maps available through a Web browser conveying the spatial arrangement of municipal infrastructure, administrative boundaries and fundamental demographics of each town in maps and tables that show proximity, elevations and distances that would otherwise be impractical to describe using words alone. Systems such as these support local governments by delivering information and services to the community in the form of variance notifications, zoning and land use inventories and updates and emergency management information including Right to Know (RTK) records that inform first responders about hazardous materials stored in industrial facilities. The study details how towns were brought in to share resources and participate in a multi-user GIS, how data was organized around the needs of users, the different implementation phases, roll out of the applications, training, maintenance and finally, how the system was adopted and is currently used.

Emergency Information Management and the Onset of Disasters: An Exercise-Based Study

Emergency Information Management and the Onset of Disasters: An Exercise-Based Study

Innovation and Employability in Knowledge Management Curriculum Design

During 2007/8, Southampton Solent University worked on a Leadership Foundation project focused on the utility of the multi-functional team approach as a vehicle to deliver innovation in strategic and operational terms in higher education (HE). The Task-Orientated Multi-Functional Team Approach (TOMFTA) project took two significant undertakings for Southampton Solent as key areas for investigation, one academic and one administrative in focus. The academic project was the development of an innovative and novel degree programme in knowledge management (KM). The new KM Honours degree programme is timely both in recognition of the increasing importance to organisations of knowledge as a commodity, and in its adoption of a distinctive structure and pedagogy. The methodology for the KM curriculum design brings together student-centred and market-driven approaches: positioning the programme for the interests of students and requirements of employers, rather than just the capabilities of staff; while looking at ways that courses can be delivered with more flexibility, e.g. accelerated and block-mode; with level-differentiated activities, common cross-year content and material that is multi-purpose for use in short courses. In order to permit context at multiple levels in common, a graduate skills strand is taught separately as part of the University’s business-facing education agenda. The KM portfolio offers a programme of practically-based courses integrating key themes in knowledge management, business, information distribution and development of the media. They develop problem-solving, communications, teamwork and other employability skills as well as the domain skills needed by emerging information management technologies. The new courses are built on activities which focus on different aspects of KM, drawing on existing content as a knowledge base. This paper presents the ongoing development of the KM programme through the key aspects in its conception and design.

Can Climate Signals Inform Emergency Management? Preliminary Evidence

The emergency management community has widely discussed the long-term implications of global climate change for weather-related hazards such as floods, hurricanes, and droughts, but the community has paid relatively little attention to the connection between these hazards and shorter-term seasonal climate fluctuations (e.g., El Niño). This paper explores the potential for applying recent scientific and technical advances in the use of seasonal climate information to improve how emergency managers address such hazards risks and their associated disaster losses. The preliminary analysis presented here begins with a brief review of evidence from the research literature linking mid- and long-term forecasts to flood planning and management. We report on a small telephone survey of emergency managers involved in flood planning and management in 26 Oregon and Washington counties that experience interannual climate-variation that can increase the frequency or intensity of flooding. Our survey findings help illuminate the opportunities and obstacles for using climate science to inform emergency management. We then present results of a 2008 survey of emergency managers and educators that asks about the use of climate information for a wider range of weather-related hazards. We conclude by summarizing the opportunities for and obstacles to the use of climate information in emergency management.

Emergency Information Management and Public Disaster Preparedness: Lessons from the 2004 Florida Hurricane Season

A key task of emergency management is to ensure that the public is adequately prepared for impending disasters in order to minimize loss to life and property. The consecutive strikes of four major hurricanes during a six-week period in Florida in 2004 provide a unique opportunity to study how governments manage and deliver emergency information for this purpose. Based on a comprehensive survey of Florida county emergency managers (91.7 per cent response rate), this study finds that 1) 23.4 per cent of respondents perceive that residents in their jurisdictions were well-prepared, 50.0 per cent state that residents were somewhat prepared, and 26.6 per cent state that residents were not well prepared, and 2) counties that use GIS systems, obtain and disseminate location specific information, provide targeted information for different population groups, maintain a website about impending disasters, and provide press conferences with three hours intervals or less report higher levels of perceived public disaster preparedness. This article concludes with lessons and recommendations for further improving public disaster preparedness.

Emergency preparedness: Using the Internet to educate the public

This research examines the use of the Internet to educate the public on emergency management and homeland security issues. Despite the fact that disasters, when they occur, happen at the local level and directly impact the general public, the public is conspicuously absent from emergency management planning and training activities at all levels. This is true despite research which suggests that the public, given accurate and relevant information, can respond well to disasters. Educating the public on possible disasters, response scenarios, and other key emergency management issues is a critical first step to engaging the public in emergency management. The current research investigates the use of one means of educating the public, the Internet, on emergency management and homeland security issues. Content analysis of the 50 largest cities in one Midwestern state was conducted to determine the following: if the Internet is used to educate the public, the types of homeland security and emergency management information available to the public on city web sites, and how difficult the existing information is to access. Results show that few cities are using the Internet as a means of educating the public on emergency management issues. Future research should investigate other means by which the general public should be educated and engaged in emergency management and how the public is using the emergency management information available to them.

Bilateral information and data exchange in case of nuclear emergencies in the German-Dutch border region

Abstract Communication and exchange of accident information and monitoring data during nuclear emergencies is of crucial importance for a coherent crisis management, especially in cross border regions. In Germany and the Netherlands the need for a reliable information and data exchange for cross border emergency management was recognized and resulted in a Memorandum of Understanding between our countries. A (sub) working group of the Niederländisch-Deutsche Kommission für grenznahe kerntechnische Einrichtungen (NDKK) was formed by NLWKN, BfS and RIVM. The working group reviewed the technical requirements and operational aspects of a coherent data and information exchange between national and federal emergency centers and the state authorities. The data exchange comprises various messages, documents, measurement data and prognostic results from model calculations from the technical decision support centers of NLWKN, BfS and RIVM. Integrated accident information is available on the emergency management websites ELAN (D) and CalWeb (NL). Via regular data exchange programs and exercises special attention is given to ensure long term sustainability of the technical infrastructure and operational data exchange procedures.

Developing m-Services: Lessons Learned from the Developers' Perspective

In recent years the Swedish Police Force (SPF) have encountered greater demands on availability and 24/7 services when dealing with errands that are regarded as low priority compared to regular police work, e.g. collecting tips from the public. One attempt to meet these increasing demands was the development of a mobile communications platform that allowed the public to communicate easily with the SPF using their own mobile phones by sending SMS and MMS. The focus of this paper is on the early phases of development of this m-service, in particular, on the specific technical issues such as interoperability and standards used by the actors on the scene affecting the development of mobile information systems. The learning experiences are as follows: First, mobile communication platforms have a large potential for contributing to the field of emergency management information systems since they can be based on open and nationally accepted standards. Second, global and national standards for sending multimedia messages are not always truly standardized. Operators and mobile phone manufacturers make minor alterations and interpretations of the standard and thereby some of the benefits found in standards disappear. Third, when developing mobile information systems we suggest and recommend that the analysis phase should be enhanced compared to traditional system development, and it should address the interoperability between mobile phones on one hand and operators on the other hand.

Manage data – manage hazards

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.

An evaluation of the role played by remote sensing technology following the World Trade Center attack

Remote sensing technology has been widely recognized for contributing to emergency response efforts after the World Trade Center attack on September 11th, 2001. The need to coordinate activities in the midst of a dense, yet relatively small area, made the combination of imagery and mapped data strategically useful. This paper reviews the role played by aerial photography, satellite imagery, and LIDAR data at Ground Zero. It examines how emergency managers utilized these datasets, and identifies significant problems that were encountered. It goes on to explore additional ways in which imagery could have been used, while presenting recommendations for more effective use in future disasters and Homeland Security applications. To plan adequately for future events, it was important to capture knowledge from individuals who responded to the World Trade Center attack. In recognition, interviews with key emergency management and geographic information system (GIS) personnel provide the basis of this paper. Successful techniques should not be forgotten, or serious problems dismissed. Although widely used after September 11th, it is important to recognize that with better planning, remote sensing and GIS could have played an even greater role. Together with a data acquisition timeline, an expanded discussion of these issues is available in the MCEER/NSF report “Emergency Response in the Wake of the World Trade Center Attack; The Remote Sensing Perspective” (Huyck and Adams, 2002)

A user-support data framework for internet retailing

The emerging information management capabilities in the context of internet retailing provide a challenging opportunity for retailers and suppliers to collaborate and offer personalised services to consumers. In this paper, we develop a user-support data framework for internet retailing towards supporting business and consumer processes. The framework dictates the information categories that should be collected through the consumer-system interaction, documents their importance for all the involved players, underlines the relationships between key business processes and virtual retail mix elements and depicts the corresponding information flow along the virtual retailing value chain. The framework is then applied in the context of a virtual retail store with advanced capabilities by relating its dimensions to the corresponding system components. The implications of the innovation are provided at the end.

By choice or by chance: How the Internet is used to prepare for, manage, and share information about emergencies

Access to reliable information is essential for emergency managers, whether they're facing tornados or terrorist attacks. How well information is managed before, during, and after a disaster can have a direct influence on how well the crisis is managed.
 
 Today the Internet plays a recurring role in all phases of emergency information management. As a communication system and an information repository, a strategic tool and a populist medium, the Internet can be a powerful element in crisis situations. It has been readily used in recent crises and it will, no doubt, be used in the next emergency, by choice or by chance. The choice must be made to use it well.
 
 This article explores the implications of the Internet for agencies that work to mitigate, prepare for, and respond to natural and human-made disasters. It also looks at implications of the Internet for members of the general public who are directly or indirectly affected by disasters.

E-emergency management in the USA: a preliminary survey of the operational state of the art

In a world of e-commerce and a growing range of governmental services offered on the internet, what is the state of electronic emergency management in the USA? Interest in the use of computers to perform emergency management functions at the state and local level emerged in the 1980s. Today, survey data indicates widespread use of the internet for communications, a moderate level of data automaton support for emergency operations centres, and the use of the internet by all state and some local agencies to communicate with the public. E-emergency management is being deployed component by component, with components being chosen to meet a variety of operational needs - how to communicate, how to disseminate public information, and how to manage information and resources. Increasingly, the term emergency operations is used to describe everything from an emergency operations centre with computers, through facilities that offer public information to internet users, to truly virtual facilities that apply incident command system management principles to supply electronic services. However, the evolution of e-emergency management as a method of performing work extends beyond the emergency operations centre to include professional interchange, electronic exercises, and the development of new concerns in emergency information management.

Towards intelligent decision support systems for emergency managers: the IDA approach

The paper presents ENEA's next step towards the development of Intelligent Decision Support Systems (IDSS) for large-scale industrial and territorial emergencies. The prototype IDA (Intelligent Decision Advisor) for emergency management in an oil port is analysed as a test case. The work was performed under the national R&D MICA project and specifically ENEA's long-term strategic MINDES Program synchronised with indications of the worldwide GEMINI (Global Emergency Management Information Network Initiative) of the G7 Committee. IDA is an approach in designing intelligent agent-based kernels of IDSS. In the frame of the generic TOGA (Top-down Object-based Goal-oriented Approach) model of abstract intelligent agents, IPK (Information, Preferences, Knowledge) architecture was employed. The specific IDA objectives were to develop and verify the properties of an information-managed agent and a knowledge managed agent, where the latter should suggest an action or plan after every new significant event in the emergency domain. The IDA functional kernel is composed of three simple agents a DirectAdvisor, which interacts with the human user and emergency domain, an InfoProvider, which manages information and intervention goals and an IDAPlanner, which plans adequate interventions. For the design, UML (Unified Modelling Language) has been employed. MDP (Markov Decision Process) and CBR (Case-Based Reasoning) are used for planning crisis management actions. Owing to a generic agent model and object-based conceptualisation, the IDA system should be adaptable to the different roles of emergency managers. The obtained results confirm the IPK conceptualisation hypothesis and provide a concrete technological experience for the next step towards high-intelligent DSSs for the management of emergencies.

Availability and Appropriateness of Communication Technology in Disasters: The Evolution of Virtual Emergency Management Information Systems

Availability and Appropriateness of Communication Technology in Disasters: The Evolution of Virtual Emergency Management Information Systems