Role of the Masjid in disaster management: preliminary investigation of evidences from Asia

The Masjid (Mosque in English) has historically played a vital role in the spiritual, moral and social upliftment of the Muslim community. Nevertheless, the role of the masjid has remained largely undocumented, and unrecognised in the development and disaster studies. Although the role of the masjid in disaster situations in many Muslim countries is evident, very little study has been undertaken to document its role as a development agent. Hence, investigating the potential of the masjid in disaster situation is an effort to describe and explore the functions and roles of a mosque in responding to a disaster. It has been remarked that the masjid has the potential to play a role in disaster management in early warning systems, as an information centre, an evacuation site and even with contingency planning. The role of the masjid during emergency response has received appreciation from the victims and the community. However, the potential has not yet been fully explored. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to explore and document the role the masjid has played in disaster management in various Asian countries and based on it develop a model of the potential role, the mosque can play in building the community resilience for disaster management in the Muslim countries

Role of the masjid in disaster management: Preliminary investigation of evidences from Asia

The Masjid (Mosque in English) has historically played a vital role in the spiritual, moral and social upliftment of the Muslim community. Nevertheless, the role of the masjid has remained largely undocumented, and unrecognised in the development and disaster studies. Although the role of the masjid in disaster situations in many Muslim countries is evident, very little study has been undertaken to document its role as a development agent. Hence, investigating the potential of the masjid in disaster situation is an effort to describe and explore the functions and roles of a mosque in responding to a disaster. It has been remarked that the masjid has the potential to play a role in disaster management in early warning systems, as an information centre, an evacuation site and even with contingency planning. The role of the masjid during emergency response has received appreciation from the victims and the community. However, the potential has not yet been fully explored. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to explore and document the role the masjid has played in disaster management in various Asian countries and based on it develop a model of the potential role, the mosque can play in building the community resilience for disaster management in the Muslim countries

Development of Autonomous Multi Agent System for Multi-Hazard Risk Assessment

Developing autonomous multi agent systems are to be considered anadvancement of multi agent systems can be applied in both the physical and the logicalworld. Constructions of multi hazard risk assessment using spatial data for disastermanagement have a problem of effective communication because of implicitknowledge. Risk assessment is the determination of quantitative or qualitative value ofrisk related to a concrete situation and a recognized hazard. Multi hazard riskassessment requires commonsense knowledge related with the hazard. This complicatesthe effective communication of data to the user in real-time machine processing insupport of disaster management. The aim of the approach is to identify the influences ofdeveloping autonomous multi agent systems for risk assesmnet in disaster management.The objectives should a) contribute to a better understanding of the transformationprocesses in commonsense knowledge related with a hazard and b) provide effectivecommunication of data to the user in real-time machine processing in support of disastermanagement.In this paper we present a metodology to modeling commonsenseknowledge in Multi hazard risk assessment using Autonomous multi agent system. Thisgives three-phase knowledge modeling approach for modeling commonsenseknowledge in, which enables holistic approach for disaster management. At the initialstage autonomous agents are initialized to convert commonsense knowledge based onmulti hazards into a questionnaire. Removing dependencies among the questions aremodeled using principal component analysis. Classification of the knowledge isprocessed through fuzzy logic agent, which is constructed on the basis of principalcomponents. Further explanations for classified knowledge are derived by agent basedon expert system technology. We have implemented the system using FLEX expertsystem shell, SPSS, XML and VB. This paper describes one such approach usingclassification of human constituents in Ayurvedic medicine. Evaluation of the systemhas shown 77% accuracy.Key words: Autonomous multi agent systems, Multi hazards, risk assessment,commonsense knowledge, Fuzzy logi

Research Directions in Information Systems for Humanitarian Logistics

This article systematically reviews the literature on using IT (Information Technology) in humanitarian logistics focusing on disaster relief operations. We first discuss problems in humanitarian relief logistics. We then identify the stage and disaster type for each article as well as the article’s research methodology and research contribution. Finally, we identify potential future research directions

Intelligent Agents for Disaster Management

ALADDIN [1] is a multi-disciplinary project that is developing novel techniques, architectures, and mechanisms for multi-agent systems in uncertain and dynamic environments. The application focus of the project is disaster management. Research within a number of themes is being pursued and this is considering different aspects of the interaction between autonomous agents and the decentralised system architectures that support those interactions. The aim of the research is to contribute to building more robust multi-agent systems for future applications in disaster management and other similar domains