Abstract: Throughout its history, Portugal Mainland and Azores Archipelago have suffered the catastrophic effects of earthquakes originating significant damages in buildings and human losses. Being aware of Portuguese seismic risk, civil protection authorities promoted some studies leading to the development of a seismic scenario simulation tool, applicable to some Mainland Portuguese regions. This paper describes recent improvements in the seismic scenario simulation tool, named LNECloss, and illustrates its applications to the evaluation of building damages and social losses, due to plausible seismic scenarios affecting Portugal. Some development requirements were identified in LNECloss simulator, namely making it available as a service on the Web, providing a stand alone tool, with no need of a geographic information desktop environment, although with the GIS capabilities of mapping and synthesis of the seismic scenario effects. In conclusion, the developed GIS Web Service offers a useful tool for seismic risk assessment and emergency planning and management.

Abstract: This position paper discusses the ongoing debate on the topic of humanitarian effectiveness and highlights the need to look at the structuring of the humanitarian system from an ethical point of view. The paper makes the argument that any community engagement with the affected population is a matter of ethics and dignity of those needs to be considered as a central focus to the discussion. The paper also discusses how the humanitarian system as a set of technology, tools & practises focusses on efficiency, and overshadows the issues of care by objectifying and turning the affected population into mere numbers. We discuss that technology and organisations are inter-twined and such a discussion of technology cannot be contemplated without considering the traditional institutional practises as a whole.

Abstract: Regardless of the type of crisis and its complexity as well as the difference of culture, objectives and priorities of the multitude organizations involved, emergency response requires effective communication in order to achieve situational awareness within inter-organizational collaboration, make decision and achieve their own objectives. However, actors are challenged by several problems. Among them, weak interaction and information exchange, unavailability of information at the right time etc. Our contribution outlined in this paper is suggesting an approach based on an empirical study conducted in France. The objective of this approach is to mitigate inter-organizational communication problems and support situational awareness (SA) by distributing needed information at the right time.

Abstract: A tactical organisation can be seen as an adhocracy designed to perform missions in uncertain, ambiguous and complex environments. Flexibility, adaptability, resilience, innovation, creativity and improvisation have all been identified as key skills for successful outcome of these missions. To learn skills associated with such abilities previous research has shown that knowledge acquired through experience plays an important role. It is important that organisations share and learn from experiences to improve their ability to cope with novel situations. In literature there is a lack of consistency in how these abilities are discussed, we therefore propose the FAIRIC model. By unravelling some of the similarities and differences we create a common vocabulary to discuss knowledge gained from experience. This can help classify different experiences and provide a systematic way of gathering and modelling knowledge on situational factors to enable sharing of mission experience over boundaries of time and space. © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: The devastating economic and societal impacts of COVID-19 can be substantially compounded by other secondary events that increase individuals' exposure through mass gatherings such as protests or sheltering due to a natural disaster. Based on the Crichton's Risk Triangle model, this paper proposes a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation framework to estimate the impact of mass gatherings on COVID-19 infections by adjusting levels of exposure and vulnerability. To this end, a case study of New York City is considered, at which the impact of mass gathering at public shelters due to a hypothetical hurricane will be studied. The simulation results will be discussed in the context of determining effective policies for reducing the impact of multi-hazard generalizability of our approach to other secondary events that can cause mass gatherings during a pandemic will also be discussed.

Abstract: Data represents an essential resource to the management of emergencies: organizations have been growingly investing in technologies and resources to lever data as an asset before, during, and after disasters and emergencies. However, research on data usage in emergency management remains fragmented, preventing practitioners and scholars from approaching data comprehensively. To address this gap, this research in progress consists of a systematic review of the literature in a two-steps approach: we first propose a socio-technical framework and use it in an exploratory mapping of the main topics covered by the literature. Our preliminary findings suggest that research on data usage primarily focuses on technological opportunities and affordances and, hence, lacks practical implementation aspects in organizations. The expected contribution is double. First, we contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of data usage in emergency management. Second, we propose future avenues for research on data and resilience.

Abstract: This paper describes our work in progress on an approach and technology for providing integrated data access in situational awareness applications – particularly for disaster and emergency response. The key new aspect of our work is an approach where information aggregation, processing, and integration capabilities are offered as a service to any new application builder. Further, we provide a framework for possibly reusing prior information integration knowledge, the development of which demands the major fraction of time and complexity in a new application, in a customized fashion for new application. Our overall goal is to provide a framework where integrated access to critical data in an emergency response situation can be enabled very rapidly and by personnel with basic IT and data handling expertise. Our approach, while general purpose, is currently motivated by and grounded in the context of situational awareness systems for incident commander decision support in the fire response domain.

Abstract: In this paper ongoing developments regarding the conceptual setup and subsequent implementation logic of a seamless spatio-temporal population dynamics model are presented. The DynaPop model aims at serving as basic input for social impact evaluation in crisis management. In addition to providing the starting point for assessing population exposure dynamics, i.e. the location and number of affected people at different stages during an event, knowledge of spatio-temporal population distribution patterns is also considered crucial for a set of other related aspects in disaster risk and crisis management including evacuation planning and casualty assessment. DynaPop is implemented via a gridded spatial disaggregation approach and integrates previous efforts on spatio-temporal modeling that account for various aspects of population dynamics such as human mobility and activity patterns that are particularly relevant in picturing the highly dynamic daytime situation.

Abstract: This paper describes the development of a framework targeted to technology providers to better understand the grand domain challenges of the emergency response and management community (EM). In developing this framework, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) researchers interviewed subject matter experts (SMEs) across the EM domain and corroborated these findings with current literature. We are presently examining relationships and dependencies within the framework. We anticipate that a thorough understanding of these gaps and dependencies will allow for a more informed approach to prioritizing research, developing tools, and applying technology to enhance performance in the EM community.

Abstract: Understanding the performance of disaster monitoring systems is a key to understanding their success, therefore; various qualitative and quantitative measures and metrics can be applied in the characterization and analysis of such systems. Through evaluation studies, problems that impede a disaster monitoring system performance can be identified. The results can be used for system control, design, and capacity planning. Previous studies address technical performance analysis metrics for analyzing monitoring systems leaving out human and organizational dimensions of such systems. Thus, the primary objective of this study is to identify and describe a set of disaster monitoring systems performance analysis metrics that may be employed to evaluate such systems. This study may be valuable to researchers and practitioners involved in disaster and emergency response studies in planning the transportation of vital first-aid supplies and emergency personnel to disaster-affected areas, and in improving chances of survival after a natural disaster.

Abstract: In this paper we describe the design and development of an interactive and generic agent based simulator, providing valuable support for organizing the emergency rescue plans of a large-scale accident. Analysis of real rescue activities has been conducted in collaboration with medical experts in order to understand the collaborative process and the involved actors and features. Based on the emergency analysis, an agent-based model and simulator was constructed including (1) the autonomous Agents – representing victims with evolving illness and rescuers (doctors, nurses, fireman) collaborating to rescue the first ones; (2) the Environment -representing the accident site having obstacles and dangerous areas and where the victims are initially spread and the doctors move to explore -perceive – treat and helpers evacuate; (3) the Interactions between rescuers – exploring collectively, evacuating by pairs, communicating directly or via artefacts- (4) the Organization of actors as distributed “independent” sub-teams in various site sub-zones or as a centralized whole team conducted by the rescue chief; and (5) the User interfaces allowing mainly initial configuration of the simulations (e.g. number of victims and states, followed strategies, rescuers behaviours), continuous visual control of the process of rescuing (e.g. site overview with acting-interacting agents, graphics, text descriptions), dynamic changes of parameters of an on-going simulation (e.g. adding new victims, adding new rescuers, or adding dangerous zones or new obstacles on sites) as well as step-by-step simulation. This simulation shows that it is possible to create a virtual environment with cooperating agents interacting in a dynamic environment. On-line and off-line analysis of simulation traces and results enable us first understanding complex situations in rescuing activities in large-scale accidents, and than planning for responding to crisis situation. This simulation approach is useful for identifying the best scenarios and eliminating potential catastrophic combinations of parameters and values, where rescue performance could be significantly impacted. © Proceedings ISCRAM 2004.

Abstract: Experiments in crisis management are expensive and difficult to realize. There is also a lack of training facilities in real crisis environments. Serious games and simulation can provide an alternative. We developed a system which enables interactive simulation for crisis management. It is called IMACSIM (Interactive Multi Agent Crisis Simulator Interpreter and Monitor). It is composed of the following components: First a software based platform for dynamic simulating of disasters. Next an event generator which can generate different crises situations. We designed a communication infrastructure that allows agents participants in the simulation to exchange messages. Every agent is able to observe the results of crisis events, process these events and initiate appropriate actions via a waypoint system. The decision making process is distributed among autonomous agents. Some actions may have an impact on the event generator, so there is an interaction between agents and event generator. We developed a first prototype. The design and test results will be described in this paper.