Search results for "Emergency management"

Data Sources Handling for Emergency Management: Supporting Information Availability and Accessibility for Emergency Responders

2017

Information is an essential component for better emergency response. Although a lot of information being available at various places during any kind of emergency, many emergency responders (ERs) use only a limited amount of the available information. The reason for this is that the available information heterogeneously distributed, in different formats, and ERs are unable to get access to the relevant information. Moreover, without having access to the needed information, many emergency responders are not able to obtain a sufficient understanding of the emergency situation. Consequently, a lot of time is being used to search for the needed information and poor decisions may be made. Therefo…

BDI Modelling and Simulation of Human Behaviours in Bushfires

2016

Each summer in Australia, bushfires burn many hectares of forest, causing deaths, injuries, and destruction of property. Emergency management strategies rely on expected citizens’ behaviour which differs from reality. In order to raise their awareness about the real population behaviour, we want to provide them with a realistic agent-based simulation. The philosophically-grounded BDI architecture provides a very suitable approach but is little used due to the lack of adapted tools. This paper uses this case study to illustrate two new tools to fill this gap: the Tactics Development Framework (TDF) and GAMA BDI architecture.

Disaster E-Health Framework for Community Resilience

2018

Aligning personal and collective interests in emerging adults during the COVID-19 emergency in Italy

2021

This study investigated the relations of emerging adults' personal (civic competence and interdependent self-construal) and community-based (sense of community and civic engagement) resources as predictors of appraisal of COVID-19 Public Health Emergency Management (PHEM) and attitudes toward preventing contagion in Italy. Participants were 2873 Italian emerging adults (71% females) aged 19-30 years (M = 22.67, SD = 2.82). Structural equation modeling revealed both direct and indirect positive associations among study variables. Civic competence and interdependent self-construal were related to sense of community and civic engagement behavior which, in turn, predicted appraisal of PHEM. App…

Effektivit�t pr�klinischer Notfallversorgung Fiktion oder Fakt?

1996

The current increase in the cost of health care must be considered as a severe threat to the prehospital emergency services system. Two examples have been selected--the patient with polytrauma and the patient in cardiac arrest--to demonstrate the dilemma between a need for objective data and the requirements of emergency patients. Study results obtained in trauma patients indicating that total prehospital time, including scene time, is correlated to patient outcome have led to the conclusion that at the scene treatment by emergency physicians may be dispensable. It has, however also been demonstrated that the time required for medical treatment at the scene is equivalent to 20% of the total…

Crowd Models for Emergency Evacuation: A Review Targeting Human-Centered Sensing

2013

Emergency evacuation of crowds is a fascinating phenomenon that has attracted researchers from various fields. Better understanding of this class of crowd behavior opens up for improving evacuation policies and smarter design of buildings, increasing safety. Recently, a new class of disruptive technology has appeared: Human-centered sensing which allows crowd behavior to be monitored in real-time, and provides the basis for real-time crowd control. The question then becomes: to what degree can previous crowd models incorporate this development, and what areas need further research? In this paper, we provide a survey that describes some widely used crowd models and discuss their advantages a…

Evaluating Accessibility and Usability of an Experimental Situational Awareness Room

2018

New advanced emergency management facilities such as a control room which is equipped with advanced ICT technologies should consider universal design principles and ensure the accessibility and usability of some important technical functions available in the room. This paper aims at evaluating the accessibility and usability of an experimental control room. This room has a flexible architecture, i.e., the information displays are interchangeable through drag-drop system on a control-panel. We used a complementary heuristic and user testing approach. A video analysis, open questionnaire and discussion with testers were applied to detect technology usage barriers. The results show that the pr…

Simulation-based Evacuation Planning for Urban Areas

2021

Evacuation planning is a critical task in disaster management. Especially in situations such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks, large crowds need to move away from danger and reach designated safe zones. For this purpose, various approaches that efficiently compute evacuation plans in urban areas have been proposed. To evaluate the computed plans, previous works employ heuristics that can only roughly estimate the egress time of each plan. Intuitively, a much better approach is to estimate the egress time via simulation. However, designing a simulation model is usually a time-consuming task and, what is more, this model can only be used to evaluate evacuation plans for a specific ar…

Towards an integrated approach to emergency management: interdisciplinary challenges for research and practice

2015

This article presents an interdisciplinary vision for large-scale integrated emergency management that has been inspired by the transition from platform centric to integrated operations in the oil and gas fields, which uses remote emergency control centres collaborating virtually with local responders. The article discusses some of the most salient research challenges for integrated emergency management, including the role of mobile technology, human-centred sensing, citizen participation and social media, and the socio-cultural determinants of disaster management. The purpose of this article is to frame an integrated emergency management approach that adopts a multi-disciplinary approach, …

Understanding Decision Support in Large-Scale Disasters: Challenges in Humanitarian Logistics Distribution

2017

Disasters are characterized by conflicting, uncertain, or lacking data. Nevertheless, humanitarian responders need to make rapid decisions. This is particularly true for the immediate response to a sudden onset disaster. Since most humanitarian decision support systems (DSS) make important assumptions on data availability and quality that are often not fulfilled in practice, decision-makers are largely left to their experience. In this paper, we identify three major challenges for an operational DSS to support distribution planning: (i) deep uncertainty; (ii) reflecting field conditions and constraints; and (iii) rapid humanitarian logistics modeling. We review the relevant theories and pro…