Ayda Kianmehr, & Duygu Pamukcu. (2022). Analyzing Citizens’ Needs during an Extreme Heat Event, based on 311 Service Requests: A Case Study of the 2021 Heatwave in Vancouver, British Columbia. In Rob Grace, & Hossein Baharmand (Eds.), ISCRAM 2022 Conference Proceedings – 19th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 174–182). Tarbes, France.
Abstract: Heat waves are becoming more common and intense with global climate change, which requires deploying resilience strategies of governments to prepare for long-term trends of higher temperatures and carefully plan emergency responses for such extreme heat events. The British Columbia province of Canada is one of the regions severely affected by extreme climatic events in 2021, which resulted in several deaths and put hundreds of thousands of people scrambling for relief. This study examines the public reactions to one of these extreme climatic events, the 2021 Pacific Northwest heatwave, in a non-emergency service request platform to uncover the types of municipal service needs during severe climatic disasters. City of Vancouver 311 system data is used to identify the impact of the heatwave on the frequency and types of service needs and examine the significance of the relationship between climatic conditions and the non-emergency service volumes.
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Christopher W. Zobel, Milad Baghersad, & Yang Zhang. (2017). Calling 311: evaluating the performance of municipal services after disasters. In eds Aurélie Montarnal Matthieu Lauras Chihab Hanachi F. B. Tina Comes (Ed.), Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response And Management (pp. 164–172). Albi, France: Iscram.
Abstract: As part of a movement towards enabling smart cities, a growing number of urban areas in the USA, such as New York City, Boston, and Houston, have established 311 call centers to receive service requests from their citizens through a variety of platforms. In this paper, for the first time, we propose to leverage the large amount of data provided by these non-emergency service centers to help characterize their operational performance in the context of a natural disaster event. We subsequently develop a metric based on the number of open service requests, which can serve as the basis for comparing the relative performance of different departments across different disasters and in different geographic locations within a given urban area. We then test the applicability and usefulness of the approach using service request data collected from New York City's 311 service center.
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Duygu Pamukcu, Christopher Zobel, & Yue Ge. (2021). Analysis of Orange County, Florida 311 System Service Requests During the COVID-19 Pandemic. In Anouck Adrot, Rob Grace, Kathleen Moore, & Christopher W. Zobel (Eds.), ISCRAM 2021 Conference Proceedings – 18th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 208–217). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: The Orlando metropolitan area in Florida, where Walt Disney World is located, is intimately familiar with impacts of natural disasters because of the yearly threat of hurricanes in the southeastern United States. One of the tools that has aided them in their efforts to monitor and manage such disasters is their 311 non-emergency call system, through which local residents can issue requests to the municipality for disaster-related information or other services. This paper provides a preliminary examination of the potential for the Orange County 311 system to provide actionable information to them in support of their efforts to manage a different type of disaster: the COVID-19 pandemic. The potential of the system to support the County in this context is illustrated through several preliminary analyses of the complete set of service requests that were registered in the first ten months of 2020.
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Duygu Pamukcu, Christopher Zobel, & Yue Ge. (2022). A Data Envelopment Analysis-based Approach for Managing Performance of Public Service Systems During a Disaster. In Rob Grace, & Hossein Baharmand (Eds.), ISCRAM 2022 Conference Proceedings – 19th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 144–153). Tarbes, France.
Abstract: In addition to their normal task of supporting community participation, engagement, and improved information access, information technology-based public service systems are also essential for maintaining critical services and providing effective communication with citizens before, during, and after emergencies. This study focuses on the impacts of disaster events on the operational performance of such service systems and discusses opportunities for managing service efficiency by rearranging and reallocating resources during emergencies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to provide a practical method for improving the relative efficiency of public service systems in such a context. We suggest a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach for quantifying the relative efficiencies associated with service requests from an input-output-based standpoint, and discuss the Orange County (Florida) 311 non-emergency service system, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, as an example of how such operational efficiency can be managed during a disruption.
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Milad Baghersad, Christopher W. Zobel, & Ravi Behara. (2020). Evaluation of Local Government Performance after Disasters. In Amanda Hughes, Fiona McNeill, & Christopher W. Zobel (Eds.), ISCRAM 2020 Conference Proceedings – 17th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (pp. 210–217). Blacksburg, VA (USA): Virginia Tech.
Abstract: Monitoring and evaluation can help organizations involved in disasters learn from their responses to prior events and improve their performance over time. Using a data set of non-emergency service requests in New York City (NYC), this paper provides a method to evaluate and compare the performance of local governments in terms of service request response times after different disaster events. In particular, the proposed method can be used to compare such performance across divisions or boroughs in a city. To illustrate this, we evaluate the performance in five of NYC's boroughs: the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island, across seven major natural disaster events from 2010 to 2012. Our analyses show that Queens and Brooklyn demonstrate better performance than the other boroughs in almost all of the seven events under consideration.
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Pamukcu, D., W. Zobel, C., & Ge, Y. “G. ”. (2023). Prioritization of disaster-related requests in an IT-enabled public service system. In Jaziar Radianti, Ioannis Dokas, Nicolas Lalone, & Deepak Khazanchi (Eds.), Proceedings of the 20th International ISCRAM Conference (pp. 586–594). Omaha, USA: University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Abstract: The local government’s continuous support is critical for the well-being of a community during disaster events. E-Government systems that establish and maintain ongoing connections with the community thus play a vital role in supporting crisis response and recovery. Such systems’ ability to adapt to the crisis circumstances and to address emergent needs helps them continue their fundamental functions during disasters. Considering various services might require different amounts and types of resources, prioritization strategies are helpful in determining the processing order of requests. This paper discusses the role of prioritizing services within an e-Government system, to better understand how such a system can be managed to best utilize available resources. The study examines how a well-functioning e-Government system, the Orange County, Florida 311 non-emergency service system, responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and how the changes in service operations requirements can affect service provision, specifically with respect to assigning or re-assigning priority levels.
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