Exploring Requirements for Joint Information Sharing in Neighbourhoods: Local Playgrounds in The Hague

Resilient communities are an important prerequisite to reach urban resilience. In such communities, citizens need to be able to participate for improving liveability and safety of their environment. The playable city, where participation is key, provides the environment for this process to unfold. This paper researches requirements for the...

Leveraging Partnerships with Logistics Service Providers in Humanitarian Supply Chains by Blockchain-based Smart Contracts

As humanitarian organizations are struggling to reach an increasing number of beneficiaries, humanitarian-business partnerships, such as the use of logistics service providers (LSPs), promise to improve effectivity and efficiency of humanitarian assistance. Blockchain-based smart contracts which ensure automation, transparency, and efficiency...

Cold chains, interrupted: The use of technology and information for decisions that keep humanitarian vaccines cool

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze how far technology and information enable, facilitate or support the planning and implementation decisions in humanitarian vaccine cold chains for vaccination campaigns. The authors specifically focus on three emerging technologies that have the potential to create more flexible conditions in...

A multicriteria Master Planning DSS for a sustainable humanitarian supply chain

Humanitarian supply chains (HSCs) contribute significantly to achieving effective and rapid responses to natural and man-made disasters. Though humanitarian organizations have during the last decades made considerable efforts to improve the response to crises in terms of effectiveness and efficiency, HSCs are still faced with so many...

Evaluating Platforms for Community Sensemaking: Using the Case of the Kenyan Elections

The profusion of information technology has created new possibilities for local communities to self-organize and respond to disruptive events. Along with the opportunities, there is also a series of challenges that need to be addressed in order to improve societal resilience. One of these challenges is to make sense of the continuous stream of...

Information Sharing and Coordination in Collaborative Flood Warning and Response Systems

The introduction of new information and communication technologies enables communities to share information and self-organize in the response to disasters. Crowd-sourcing approaches enable professional authorities to capture information from the ground in real-time. However, there is a gap between the professional and community-driven response:...

A Sustainability Maturity Assessment Method for the Humanitarian Supply Chain

The Humanitarian Supply Chain (HSC) is key to successful relief operations. Today, HSC managers faces many challenges: (1) the increasing gap between funding and appeals; (2) donors ask for more transparency and accountability; (3) the growing pressure to switch to sustainable development. To maintain a competitive position (order winner) in the...

The IsITethical? Responsible Research and Innovation for Disaster Risk Management

This paper describes the IsITethical? Exchange, a European knowledge and service hub we are developing with and for diverse parties involved in crisis and disaster risk management. Their commitment to European values and fundamental rights underpins the rationale of the initiative, which is to support European societies’ need for high quality...

The isitethical? Exchange responsible research and innovation for disaster risk management

This paper describes the IsITethical? Exchange, a European knowledge and service hub we are developing with and for diverse parties involved in crisis and disaster risk management. Their commitment to European values and fundamental rights underpins the rationale of the initiative, which is to support European societies' need for high quality...

Measuring the quality of humanitarian information products: Insights from the 2015 Nepal earthquake

Information plays a critical role in humanitarian assistance. It has become a product that is shared for multiple purposes such as situational awareness, decision-making, coordination, reporting, and attracting funding. In the aftermath of sudden onset disasters, humanitarians are constrained with huge workload, time pressure, and...

Behind the Scenes of Scenario-Based Training: Understanding Scenario Design and Requirements in High-Risk and Uncertain Environments

Simulation exercises as a training tool for enhancing preparedness for emergency response are widely adopted in disaster management. This paper addresses current scenario design processes, proposes an alternative approach for simulation exercises and introduces a conceptual design of an adaptive scenario generator. Our work is based on a...

Decision-making under uncertainty

Towards designing and implementing an empirically grounded research for humanitarian logistics after nepal earthquake

Purpose This paper proposes a research design for effective use of qualitative data from field research in a quantitative analysis of humanitarian logistics. Design/methodology/approach Our research design is composed of qualitative and quantitative components. The qualitative part has four steps: preparation, data collection, data combination...

Hurricane Harvey Report: A fact-finding effort in the direct aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in the Greater Houston Region

On August 25, 2017, Hurricane Harvey made landfall near Rockport, Texas as a Category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of approximately 200 km/hour. Harvey caused severe damages in coastal Texas due to extreme winds and storm surge, but will go down in history for record-setting rainfall totals and flood-related damages. Across large...

Improving situation awareness in crisis response teams: An experimental analysis of enriched information and centralized coordination

In responding to an emergency, the actions of emergency response teams critically depend upon the situation awareness the team members have acquired. Situation awareness, and the design of systems to support it, has been a focus in recent emergency management research. In this paper, we introduce two interventions to the core processes of...