Utilizing the Potential of the Affected Population and Prevalent Mobile Technology during Disaster Response: Propositions for a Literature Survey

Despite the growing awareness of the untapped potential of the affected population in a disaster situation, their inclusion in a disaster management is extremely limited. This study aims to survey the literature to see whether utilizing the affected people and prevalent mobile technology can be used during disaster response. The idea is to...

Semantic annotation of existing geo-datasets: A case study of disaster response in Netherlands

Use of relevant geo-information is one of the important issues for performing different tasks and processes in disaster response phase. In order to save time and cost, services could be employed for integrating and extracting relevant up-to-date geo-information. For this purpose, semantics of geo-information should be explicitly defined. This...

A Machine learning approach for rapid disaster response based on multi- modal data: The case of housing & shelter needs

Along with climate change, more frequent extreme events, such as flooding and tropical cyclones, threaten the livelihoods and wellbeing of poor and vulnerable populations. One of the most immediate needs of people affected by a disaster is finding shelter. While the proliferation of data on disasters is already helping to save lives, identifying...

A Greedy Scheduling of Post-Disaster Response and Restoration using Pressure-Driven Models and Graph Segment Analysis

In this manuscript, we consider the problem of optimally scheduling the restoration of a water distribution network with multiple failures after a disaster. The decisions made are the sequence of burst/broken pipes and leaks that need to be replaced or repaired, respectively, subject to constraints on workforce availability and physical...

Identifying mechanisms for achieving voluntary data sharing in cross-sector partnerships for public good

It has been advocated that sharing business data can generate public value. Still this information sharing often needs to be done on voluntary basis and that often poses major challenges. The main research question addressed in this paper is: How is voluntary information sharing to create public value achieved and what are the drivers and...

Disaster Response for Effective Mapping and Wayfinding

The research focuses on guiding the affected population towards a safe location in a disaster area by utilizing their self-help capacity with prevalent mobile technology. In contrast to the traditional centralized information management systems for disaster response, this research proposes a decen- tralized computer-supported management system...

Netcentric Information Orchestration: Assuring Information and System Quality in Public Safety Networks

During daily operations, relief agencies such as police, fire brigade and medical services manage information in accordance with their respective processes and organization structure. When disaster strikes, the ad-hoc combinations of such hierarchy based information systems fail to assure high information quality (IQ) and system quality (SQ) for...

Self-Organisation for Survival

In a dynamic or disruptive situation, such as disasters, a fully mobile and decentralized infrastructure-less network seems to be a viable option for communication. Citizens are confronted with challenges such as complicated deployment of these networks, resource-constrained mobile phones and mobility. This requires communication networks to...

Distributed collaborative situation-map making for disaster response

A situation map that shows the overview of a disaster situation serves as a valuable tool for disaster response teams. It helps them to orientate their location and to make disaster response decisions. It is, however, a complicated task to rapidly generate a complete and comprehensive situation map of a disaster area, particularly due to the...

Humanitarian access, interrupted: dynamic near real-time network analytics and mapping for reaching communities in disaster-affected countries

In the immediate aftermath of a disaster, local and international aid organisations deploy to deliver life-saving aid to the affected population. Yet pre-disaster road maps and road transportation models do not capture disruptions to the transportation network caused by the disaster or the dynamic changes of the situation, resulting in...

Towards coordinated self-organization: An actor-centered framework for the design of disaster management information systems

Traditionally, disaster management information systems have been designed to facilitate communication and coordination along stable hierarchical lines and roles. However, to support coordination in disaster response, disaster management information systems need to cater for the emerging roles, responsibilities and information needs of the...

Rapid Building Damage Detection Through SAR Timeseries Analysis in the Google Earth Engine: Using Sentinel-1 GRD imagery in the Google Earth Engine to detect Building Damage in Rapid Disaster Response Situations

Humanitarian crises related to building and infrastructure damage, i.e. natural hazards and collateral damage during warfare, result in many hundreds of thousands of casualties on a yearly base. Earthquakes, for example, are responsible for taking around 50.000 lives on a yearly base due to falling debris and collapsing buildings, making them...

An exploratory study on the (re)configuration of humanitarian supply chains throughout the disaster life cycle

Increasing situational awareness in the golden period of the response phase of sudden-onset disasters by mapping community reachability

In the response phase of sudden-onset natural disasters, information is of crucial importance for relief organisations and their aid workers. Information is necessary for gaining situational awareness in a disaster for effective decision-making in response operations. In my research, an information system is designed that maps the reachability...

Compound risk: when sudden-onset disasters coincide with COVID-19: Balancing the livelihood and the COVID-19 trajectory of rural communities in developing countries

During the battle against COVID-19, sudden-onset disasters keep happening. These two consecutive events are different in nature and sometimes ask for counter-productive policy interventions: where the epidemic can be contained by ensuring social distancing practices, reducing the number of contacts, and offering hygienic conditions, the response...

Improving the logistics and collaborative sensemaking during a disaster relief effort using a flexible floating and modular seaport: Investigating humanitarian logistics using a mathematical optimization model and a complex interaction research

Sometimes seaport capacity is a bottleneck during disaster relief operations. This research investigates a flexible, floating and modular seaport. This seaport is stored all around the world and when necessary it ships seaport handling capacity from those storage facilities to the disaster area in order to help with the disaster relief effort....

Resilient airports: Using a new resilience measuring approach to evaluate policies that improve the resilience of airports in the immediate post-disaster response

Airports are a special critical infrastructure in a disaster response from a resilience point of view. They must overcome two types of shocks when they are affected by a disaster. They are not only hit by a disaster, which decreases their performances. Airports also need to act as a humanitarian and logistic hub for the disaster response which...