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: In this article the focus is how to train collaboration and communication between emergency authorities in two countries (Norway and Sweden) by using a web-based tool supporting tabletop like exercises. The exercises are accomplished in three steps: Scenario design; exercise design and realization; and evaluation to examine the results of the exercises and for feedback to new scenario designs. The software ties all three steps together. The process is iterative, and involves users from each emergency authority. The preliminary results after two years show that the approach is promising. To be able to better foresee what will happen during an exercise the need for a simulator has appeared as one desirable and possible direction for further research.

Abstract: Real-world crises are not prescriptive and may contain unexpected events, described here as startle points. Including these events in emergency training simulator scenarios is crucial in order to prepare for startle points that may arise in the real world. Startle points occur when individuals who assess and monitor emergency scenarios, are suddenly faced with an unexpected event, and are unsure how to proceed. This paper offers a non-empirical framework that explores how cues generated by startle points affect decision making. Future research will use the framework to explore how experts and novices experience, and then adapt to startle points, as a function of decision mode, situation awareness, and emotional arousal. The resulting data can then be used to identify cues surrounding startle points and as a consequence, create dynamic scenarios for online training simulators so that individuals can prepare and adapt to them, and transfer acquired skills to real-world emergencies.

Abstract: This work proposes a model to evaluate systems regarding their resilience in handling unexpected disturbances. To exemplify the use of the proposed model, we chose to analyze the World Youth Day (WID), an important event on the global scenario that happened this year in Rio de Janeiro, a city which will host big events in the next few years, like the World Cup and the Olympic Games. From this event, we chose two disturbances that stressed the system and had the possibility to cause a lot of problems to the event and the city, like the rains in Guaratiba and the arrival of the Pope's committee. After analyzing how the overall WYD organization deal with these disturbances we conclude that, besides the success of the event, the organization showed much more signs of brittleness than resilience.

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: Emergency plans are developed to serve as a basis for response actions required in real situations. However, plan development is not an easy task and usually relies on complex processes. Due to the uncertainty of emergencies, one of the most challenging tasks is the development of possible courses of action. To deal with this uncertainty, we propose the use of scenario techniques for the definition of courses of action. Specifically, we adopt the use of CIA-ISM scenario technique for structuring the chain of events that can occur in a crisis that would support planning teams to develop courses of action. A practical application of the methodology has been successfully conducted by an emergency planning team in Brazil. The practical application of the CIA-ISM process was supported by a software artifact called CAEPlan. Lessons learned about the empirical application of both the methodology and the software artifact are presented.

Abstract: One of the goals of the crowd control project at Delft University of Technology is to detect and track people during a crisis event, classify their behavior and assess what is happening. The assumption is that the crisis area is observed by multiple cameras (fixed or mobile). The cameras sense the environment and extract features such as the amount of motion. These features are the input to a Bayesian network with nodes corresponding to situations such as terroristic attack, fire, and explosion. Given the probabilities of the observed features, by reasoning, the likelihood of the possible situations can be computed. A prototype was tested in a train compartment and its environment. Forty scenarios, performed by actors, were recorded. From the recordings the conditional probabilities have been computed. The scenarios are designed as scripts which proved to be a good methodology. The models, experiments and results will be presented in the paper.

Abstract: In recent years Cross-Impact Analysis (CIA) has resurged as a powerful tool for forecasting the occurrence or not of a set of interrelated events in complex situations, such as emergencies. In this sense, CIA can be used for creating working models out of significant events and crisis scenarios. CIA has been combined with other methodological approaches in order to increase its functionality and improve its final outcome. This is the case of the merger of CIA and the technique called Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM). The CIA-ISM approach aims at contributing to CIA with tools for detecting critical events and supporting graphical representation of scenarios. In this paper, major extensions to CIA-ISM are presented. These extensions are based on the inclusion of initial condition events and outcome events as two new event types that make CIA-ISM much richer in its potential span of application areas. The practical implications of these major extensions to CIA-ISM are illustrated with an example. The usefulness of this contribution to researchers and practitioners concerned with emergency planning and preparedness is also discussed.

Abstract: Companies work increasingly more on projects as a means of executing organizational decisions. However, too many enterprise projects result in failure. Hence, firms should follow a risk management method that drives their projects toward success. Nevertheless, project managers often deal with risks intuitively. This is partly because they lack the proper means to correctly manage the underlying risks which affect the entire cycle of their projects. Therefore, one purpose is to identify the critical events that managers may encounter before the beginning of the project and during its development. In addition, we propose CIA-ISM to represent existing relationships between the unforeseen events in the project?s lifetime and their key performance indicators. This also predicts the influence of risks on project performance over time by means of scenarios. The tool proposed would thus help practitioners to manage enterprise projects risks in a more effective and proactive way. We have validated the predictive capability of the CIA-ISM model with 22 real projects. The results show a high level of predictive capability in terms of risk analysis and key performance indicators.

Abstract: In Emergency Management and Business Continuity Planning, scenarios are a widely used tool. Existing scenario creation systems allow distributed groups to create scenarios together but have limited collaboration support. This study developed and evaluated a solution to provide various types of collaboration support around a knowledge structure at the core of a collaborative scenario creation system called Collario. Following the Design Science paradigm, it evolved through four iterations into a working prototype. Several evaluation methods, including protocol analysis and field study, were employed to evaluate the design effects and obtain user feedback. The results of the first field trial are described in this paper. They indicate that the system is useful to support creation and discussion of emergency scenarios in virtual teams and to share knowledge and experiences among geographically distributed emergency professionals and researchers. It was also found that the system is not hard to learn and use.