Abstract: Control center staff is used to working with software applications for e.g. surveillance of production processes, for controlling and timing of industrial logistics, and for recording and filing incidents and actions. Yet, decision-support systems for emergency situations pose additional demands on employees in this domain. This paper reports first findings for psychological requirements for decision support systems in the rise of emergencies as identified in a federal German research project in the domain of public transportation. In control centers both the humans on duty who have to intervene during an emergency, and the technical system which provides decision-alternatives for supporting the action are considered. Based on findings of the project, psychological, technical and organizational requirements identified in interviews, observations, document analysis and additional relevant literature are generalized.

Abstract: The mankind has passed through a significant historical frontier, including technological processes where hazardous substances are the potential threats for the employees, the public, environment and property and therefore it is inevitable to pay increased attention to the occurrence of the industrial accidents and mainly to their prevention. The area of safety of technical and technological systems is very closely connected not only with the reliability of the processes but also with the technical as well as social, legal and other aspects. There exist several systematic approaches, methods and techniques to assess industrial processes and risks linked to these processes on the European Union level and also on the national level of each member state. We can mention some basic systematic approaches – MOSAR, CPQRA, ARAMIS, PRA (PSA) widely used in this area. But according to the analyst's needs they usually miss structured and systematic approach, how to complete the risk assessment in steps and what the content of each of these steps is. The main focus of this paper is to discuss the theoretical aspects of the risk assessment in industrial processes and to show the possible approach of structured and systematic methods with support of logical diagrams to fulfill all tasks concerning the industrial accident assessment. Last but not least it is to present the research activities of the Department of Crisis Management, University of Žilina in Žilina, Slovakia. © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: The damage caused by recent events in Japan in 2011 and USA in 2012 highlighted the need to adopt measures to increase the resilience of communities against extreme events and disasters. In addition to the conventional and official information that is necessary for adaptation to disasters, recently, common citizens residents in the affected areas also began contributing with voluntary qualified and updated information. In this context, this work-in-progress presents an approach that uses voluntary information – Also known by VGI (Volunteered Geographic Information) – As a data source for Spatial Decision Support Systems (SDSS) in order to assist the decision-making in disaster management. Our approach consists of a framework that integrates voluntary and conventional data, a SDSS and processes and methods for decision-making. As a result, it is expected that this approach will assist official organizations in disaster management by providing mechanisms and information.

Abstract: A convenient way to test Urban Search And Rescue (USAR) robots would be in virtual environments (VEs). Evaluations in VEs are generally accepted as alternative for real scenarios. There are obvious differences between operation in a real and virtual environment. Nonetheless, the current experiment showed no significant differences in situation awareness (SA) and performance during several elementary tasks (e.g. slalom) between a virtual world and a previous experiment in reality (Mioch, Smets, & Neerincx, 2012). Only small dependencies between the unit tasks were found. The effect of individual differences (like gender, km driven per year, and gaming experience), were significant for certain elementary tasks. Testing robots in virtual environments could still be useful even if differences between VE and reality exist, since comparisons of different conditions in VE seems to have the same results as the same comparison in the field (Bishop & Rohrmann, 2003; Van Diggelen, Looije, Mioch, Neerincx, & Smets, 2012).

Abstract: Humanitarian logistics represents a broad range of activities taking place within humanitarian organizations, the bulk of these activities are also components of a broader humanitarian supply chain – The network involved with providing physical aid to beneficiaries. Humanitarian logistics information systems improve information flows, which integrates logistics units more efficiently with non-logistics units within the humanitarian supply chains and provides better feedback to donors, ensuring more effective operations. Humanitarian logistics activities occur across the disaster management cycle. Humanitarian logistics information systems not only improve logistics activities in each phase, but can improve the continuity of humanitarian operations by sharing information throughout the transition of different disaster management cycle phases. Through collaboration between organizations, humanitarian logistics information systems also have the potential to reduce corruption and the market distortion which can occur during humanitarian operations.

Abstract: In the area of information system design, the development of context-aware systems which can provide relevant information in a context-driven fashion to support mobile users in crisis management tasks represents a great challenge. Motivated by the fact that police officers are often overwhelmed by too much information, the goal of the MOSAIC project (a multi-officer system of agents for informed crisis control) is to support mobile police officers by a system which delivers contextualized information that is relevant to the task at hand. In order to elicit the information requirements of police officers who are involved in crisis situations, a questionnaire-based requirements elicitation study has been carried out in the context of the work described here. The results mainly shed light on the situation-specific information requirements of police officers in certain scenarios. The design requirements that follow from our study have clearly the potential to guide the design of context-based information delivery systems for users involved in critical situations such as the police officers we target. Our findings thus offer an important contribution to the field of information system design for crisis management.

Abstract: In this paper we overview the ongoing research into the application of case-based reasoning in emergency management, based on which we propose a new approach for representation of large-scale disaster cases. The approach takes the environmental factors into account, and the case is organized according to key scenes, rather than disaster types. Each scene consists of inherent attributes, which are concerned with the disaster type, and environment attributes, which usually facilitate the adjustment of the decision-making, and sometimes play crucial role. To describe the environment attributes, the fuzzy sets are employed to take use of the non-quantitative information. The nearness of the fuzzy sets is used to retrieve the similar case. Based on this approach, the case retrieval could even extract the case with different type but similar environment, supposing the inherent attribute is analogous. © 2012 ISCRAM.

Abstract: This paper offers a descriptive account of Twitter (a micro-blogging service) across four high profile, mass convergence events-two emergency and two national security. We statistically examine how Twitter is being used surrounding these events, and compare and contrast how that behavior is different from more general Twitter use. Our findings suggest that Twitter messages sent during these types of events contain more displays of information broadcasting and brokerage, and we observe that general Twitter use seems to have evolved over time to offer more of an information-sharing purpose. We also provide preliminary evidence that Twitter users who join during and in apparent relation to a mass convergence or emergency event are more likely to become long-term adopters of the technology.

Abstract: For sustainable care of cultural heritage it is essential to set accurate goals. However, the difficulty involved in establishing what is accurate in any given circumstance is often highly underestimated. Unbalanced decision making based on partial consideration of the situation surrounding a cultural heritage asset can at best result in inefficient use of resources and at worst will lead to its rapid loss. But the balance of risk against benefit is not straightforward, the impact of certain activities are far easier to quantify than others. Consequently, the adoption of a well balanced approach that considers all activities equally within the same framework is the key to providing appropriate and sustainable levels of protection. The development of an appropriate and systematic methodology offers a resolution to this problem. The outcome will be a suite of performance indicators assigned to each activity within a multivariate management framework. This paper describes the development and validation of such a methodology and the current status of the author's research.

Abstract: The paper provides an overview of past, present and future development in the program to implement a Flood Forecasting and Decision-Support System (DSS) for the SAIH network in some Spanish basins. These tools represent a significant advance by embedding the decision-making components for management of hydraulic infrastructure into the flood forecasting and flood early warning procedures. The DSS has been implemented based on an open-shell platform for integrating various data sources and different simulation models. So far, it covers the Segura, Jucar, Tajo, Duero and Miño-Sil basins, which represent 42% of Spanish territory. Special attention is paid to the decision-support for the operation of the 66 major reservoirs as a fundamental part of flood management.

Abstract: Crucial to improving the management of emergency situations is the definition of suitable Emergency Plans and training of participants in the application of such plans. In order to design a good Emergency Plan, experts from different areas need to work collaboratively to identify all the events and the relationships among such events. The main purpose of this project is to study different information technology techniques that can be used in the elaboration of and training for Emergency Plans, based on the use of scenarios. The use of such techniques will support collaborative development of Emergency Plans, the use of rich formats that provide different perspectives on a plan, the exportation and sharing of plans in order to increase their evolution and improvement, the instruction of participants, as well as better interaction, participation and exchange of knowledge. Key aspects of the plans for this recently begun project are described in this paper.

Abstract: An emerging paradigm for the processing of data streams involves human and machine computation working together, allowing human intelligence to process large-scale data. We apply this approach to the classification of crisis-related messages in microblog streams. We begin by describing the platform AIDR (Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response), which collects human annotations over time to create and maintain automatic supervised classifiers for social media messages. Next, we study two significant challenges in its design: (1) identifying which elements must be labeled by humans, and (2) determining when to ask for such annotations to be done. The first challenge is selecting the items to be labeled by crowd sourcing workers to maximize the productivity of their work. The second challenge is to schedule the work in order to reliably maintain high classification accuracy over time. We provide and validate answers to these challenges by extensive experimentation on real world datasets.