Abstract: This paper describes the development of a multi-functional airborne management support system within the frame of the Austrian national safety and security research programme. The objective was to assist crisis management tasks of emergency teams and armed forces in disaster management by providing multi spectral, near real-time airborne image data products. As time, flexibility and reliability as well as objective information are crucial aspects in emergency management, the used components are tailored to meet these requirements. This article includes the individual system components as well as their performance using examples from lab tests and real-life deployments. Based on this, the impact of existing command and control processes as well as the benefits for time critical decision making processes are described based on expertise of the involved end users. In addition, it gives an outlook on future perspectives.

Abstract: The analysis and forecasting of eminent air quality play a significant role in municipal regulatory planning and emergency preparedness. In this paper, a FS-GA-BPNN model forecasting the daily average Air Quality Index (AQI) is proposed. Special procedures for feature extraction to find more potential significant variables and feature selection to remove redundant information and avoid overfitting are conducted before modelling. Three different models – BPNN, GA-BPNN and FS-GA-BPNN are established to compare the prediction accuracy, generalization ability and reliability. 17 parameters involving pollutant concentration, meteorological elements and surrounding factors are found essential for the method effectiveness. The result shows that the FS-GA-BPNN model generally performs superior to ordinary BPNN, suggesting the necessity of extensive data mining and feature extraction for successful machine learning. The results of this paper can help to conduct air quality pre-warning system and improve the emergency planning process of extreme weather events.

Abstract: This article focuses on the question of the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on air pollution. The chosen approach is based on the principle of “Physics of Decision” (POD), which considers: (i) the performance of a system as a physical trajectory within the framework of its performance indicators, (ii) risks or opportunities (potentialities) as forces that may deviate that trajectory, and (iii) benefits or damages (actualities) as concrete deviations of the performance trajectory. The daily data about the air pollution in Paris area (France) has been gathered for eight years (2014-2021) and three main performance indicators have been chosen. Then, the performance trajectory of each year has been plotted and the expected trajectories of 2020 and 2021 have been guessed from the previous ones. The deviation between the expected and actual trajectories of 2020 and 2021 have been assessed, and using physics and motion laws, evaluated as a deviation force.

Abstract: This paper is about European networked crisis and disaster management and how to achieve more intelligent decision support and better collaboration. Although collaboration processes are established, the underlying information management tools today don?t support integrated electronic information management in multi-organizational scenarios. This leads to a fragmentation of relevant information into pieces held by different stakeholders. Recently, the concept of the Common Information Space has been introduced as possible solution. This paper looks to the domain of Air Traffic Management where a similar problem was tackled by a concept called System Wide Information Management. The paper starts with describing the operational context, the unresolved needs, and the derived requirements. Experiences from the Air Traffic Management domain are gathered and compared with current solution concepts from the public safety domain. The paper concludes with lessons learned during the on-going development in the public safety domain.

Abstract: Airport security is a very relevant, diverse, and complex system in any country. September 11th made this issue an increasing concern for almost every country in the world. Prior to September 11th the media, watchdog groups, and commissions established by the United States Congress, were adamant that airport security had major flaws. Currently many countries are revamping their airport security systems. The U.S. and other governments are implementing many new systems and procedures. There are numerous potential pitfalls with this implementation process and these new systems will have impacts on the public. For example, these systems could reduce freedom, still be flawed, and affect the economy. The primary intents of this paper are to classify airport security as a complex large-scale safety-critical system, to discuss what make airports so complex, describe the information systems that are involved with such systems, and discuss the impacts on the people involved.

Abstract: While accepted as part of critical infrastructure (CI) resilience, no consensus exists on how to measure the exact
minimum level of service or the rapidity of rapidly restoring services. The H2020 European project IMPROVER
(Improved risk evaluation and implementation of resilience concepts to critical infrastructure) suggests to use the
public?s declared tolerance levels for both minimum level of service and rapidity of service restoration as criteria
with which to evaluate if the resilience of a given CI is resilient enough. This paper demonstrates the development
of a questionnaire-based methodology to determine public tolerance levels. It then tests this methodology via a
pilot case study at IMPROVER?s Hungarian Highway Living Lab. The paper argues that public tolerance levels
are a reasonable choice for resilience evaluation criteria and demonstrates that the questionnaire-based
methodology permits one to evaluate public perception in such a way as to compare it to technical resilience
analyses.

Abstract: This paper presents a novel, advanced research approach to investigate organizational safety culture as a complex phenomenon, combining agent modeling and organizational ethnography. Safety culture is an emergent property of organizations that largely influences the resilience of organizational responses in crisis situations. However, theory describing the precise ways in which safety culture influences resilience is lacking. Thus the first step is to understand how safety culture gradually emerges from interactions between formal and informal organizational processes. The paper explains the proposed research methodology illustrated by a case of an aircraft maintenance organization. A preliminary analysis is performed from which a conceptual model is derived, and the subsequent simulation and automated analytical techniques that will be used to validate the model and gain new insights are explained.

Abstract: In disasters, local civilians on or near the scene, are often first to respond and give aid. Therefore, the public needs to be well-informed with accurate, time critical information. However, a primary information source is event-specific scales that are inconsistent in their categorization and measurement, adding confusion to public responsiveness. These scales are not extendable to new emergencies in a changing world. We argue for development of a unified emergency scale to facilitate communication and understanding. This scale will inform local communities with regional community-specific information, and will be extendable for further use by professional responders. Research in progress elicited 15 dimensions of an emergency using a Delphi-like process and then ranked the dimensions by importance utilizing Thurstone's Law of Comparative Judgment. Contributions of this paper are to highlight the need for an unequivocal, unified scale and further its development.

Abstract: Natural and manmade disasters pose a myriad of challenges, which are more severe for individuals with disabilities. Ordinarily to perform daily activities, the disabled get support from assistive technological devices and services; these are commonly disrupted during and after disasters. A proposed solution to support those with visual impairment is a cost-effective wearable 'Smart Cap'. The Smart Cap provides narratives about the surrounding environment while establishing communication between the user (the visually impaired) and a rich online reservoir of knowledge base system capable of vocalising narratives. As a proof-of-concept, this study is implemented using Raspberry Pi, the Amazon Web Services and a P-Cap fitted with a camera. The aim of this research work is to provide an assistive technology to help the visually impaired navigate their way out of any potentially disastrous situation like other citizens would. The proposed system and its usage in disaster situations is an innovative, cost-effective solution specifically addressing the needs of visually impaired persons.

Abstract: Decision-making in crisis management can benefit from routine monitoring of the (social) media to discover the mass opinion on highly sensitive crisis events. We present an experiment that analyzes Chinese microblog data (extracted from Weibo.cn) to measure sentiment strength and its change in relation to the recent PM 2.5 air pollution events. The data were analyzed using SentiStrength algorithm together with a special sentiment words dictionary tailored and refined for Chinese language. The results of time series analysis on detected sentiment strength showed that less than one percent of the posts are strong-positive or strong negative. Weekly sentiment strength measures show symmetric changes in positive and negative strength, but overall trend moved towards more positive opinions. Special attention was given to sharp bursts of sentiment strength that coincide temporally with the occurrence of extreme social events. These findings suggest that sentiment strength analysis may generate useful alert and awareness of pending extreme social events.

Abstract: Modern safety-critical organizations are characterized by complex, nonlinear dynamics involving many interrelated actors and processes. Safety issues that emerge from these complex dynamics increasingly remain hidden, until an incident or even a serious accident occurs. Traditional safety analysis methods developed long ago for much simpler organizations cannot help identifying, explaining and predicting many safety-related properties of modern organizations. To address this issue, in the paper a formal approach is proposed to establish relations between local dynamics of actors of a complex safety-critical organization and global safetyrelated properties that emerge from these dynamics. In contrast to the traditional approaches, the organizational dynamics are specified by taking the agent perspective with an organizational layer. The application of the approach is illustrated by a simulation case study, in which spread of safety-critical information in an air navigation service provider is investigated. © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: Results from disaster research suggest that methods for coordination between individual emergency responders and organizations should recognize the independence and autonomy of these actors. These actor features are key factors in effective adaptation and improvisation of response to emergency situations which are inherently uncertain. Autonomy and adaptability are also well-known aspects of a multi-agent system (MAS). In this paper we present two MAS strategies that can effectively handle aircraft deicing incidents. These MAS strategies help improve to prevent and reduce e.g. airplane delays at deicing stations due to changing weather conditions or incidents at the station, where aircraft agents adopting pre-made plans that would act on behalf of aircraft pilots or companies, would only create havoc. Herein each agent using its own decision mechanism deliberates about the uncertainty in the problem domain and the preferences (or priorities) of the agents. Furthermore, taking both these issues into account each proposed MAS strategy outperforms a naive first-come, first-served coordination strategy. The simulation results help pilots and companies taking decisions with respect to the scheduling of the aircraft for deicing when unexpected incidents occur: they provide insights in the impacts and means for robust selection of incident-specific strategies on e.g. deicing station delays of (individual) aircraft.

Abstract: Greene County in Dayton, OH houses Wright Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB), whose estimated 2009 economic impact within its Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) is $5.17 million. Despite its military/strategic importance as the largest base in the U.S. Air Force, literature search did not uncover a published comprehensive risk analysis for WPAFB, or even Greene County, across the entire spectrum of hazards from natural to technological to man-made (including terrorism). This paper presents a summary report on risk determination and economic impact data for Greene County and WPAFB (within Greene County) in the context of riverine flooding, using FEMA's HAZUS-MH tool. It is hoped that the results will further the regional compilation of data and thus prove of use to the local disaster management community while generally growing the overall body of work in risk analysis. Future work aims to expand regional risk determination to other natural disasters and terrorism scenarios.