Implementation of a Community Emergency Security Alert System

Emergency alert and response is carried out in different ways around the world. Governments, corporate bodies and individuals take emergencies very seriously and continue to develop ingenious ways of responding to emergencies very swiftly. Most Urban areas have well-developed emergency response systems but this is not true of rural and sub-urban settlements. Security risk keeps increasing by the day due to rapid population growth. This is particularly true at the grassroots or community level. This paper proposes a very effective and economical way of alerting a community to all kinds of security emergencies. It incorporates the use of a mobile application that was codenamed “CEMAS” (Community Emergency Alarm System). The mobile application with a “Panic button” on it provides all inhabitants of the community with the means of triggering two SMS-activated central alarms. The first alarm is located at the community center and the second at the community police station. The central alarm system is activated by pressing the “Panic Button” whenever there is a security threat. The designed and implemented system worked satisfactorily well

Implementation of a Community Emergency Security Alert System

Emergency alert and response is carried out in different ways around the world. Governments, corporate bodies and individuals take emergencies very seriously and continue to develop ingenious ways of responding to emergencies very swiftly. Most Urban areas have well-developed emergency response systems but this is not true of rural and sub-urban settlements. Security risk keeps increasing by the day due to rapid population growth. This is particularly true at the grassroots or community level. This paper proposes a very effective and economical way of alerting a community to all kinds of security emergencies. It incorporates the use of a mobile application that was codenamed “CEMAS” (Community Emergency Alarm System). The mobile application with a “Panic button” on it provides all inhabitants of the community with the means of triggering two SMS-activated central alarms. The first alarm is located at the community center and the second at the community police station. The central alarm system is activated by pressing the “Panic Button” whenever there is a security threat. The designed and implemented system worked satisfactorily well

An Overview of Disaster and Emergency Management Systems Models

Emergencies and disasters can cause immense physical, emotional and financial losses to individuals, organisations, and larger scale countries. These emergencies and disasters can fundamentally cause casualties, and in many cases, loss of life. Psychological and financially the impacts on individuals, organisations and countries can be irretrievable due to the impact of the disaster or emergency. Emergency management systems provide a multi-level overview of emergency environments. Bearing the current emergency management models in mind, this article looks at reviewing the existing six models in order to provide a solution for a more comprehensive emergency management system for implementation. If emergencies are managed effectively, these negative impacts can be removed or at least minimised. The article evaluates with an extensive literature review, how to develop a holistic framework to address the shortfalls of existing models

Multi-synchronous collaboration between desktop and mobile users: A case study of report writing for emergency management

The development of multi-synchronous decision support systems to facilitate collaboration between diverse users is an emerging field in emergency management. Traditionally, information management for emergency response has been a centralised effort. However, modern devices such as smartphones provide new methods for gaining real-time information about a disaster from users in the field. In this paper, we present a framework for multi-synchronous collaborative report writing in the scope of emergency management. This framework supports desktop-based users as information providers and consumers, alongside mobile users as information providers to facilitate multi-synchronous collaboration. We consider the benefits of our framework for writing collaborative Situation Reports and discuss future directions for research

Operationalising learning from rare events: framework for middle humanitarian operations managers

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the learning from rare events and the knowledge management processinvolved, which presents a significant challenge to many organizations. This is primarily attributed to the inability tointerpret these events in a systematic and “rich” manner, which this paper seeks to address. We start by summarizing therelevant literature on humanitarian operations management (HOM), outlining the evolution of the socio-technical disasterlifecycle and its relationship with humanitarian operations, using a supply chain resilience theoretical lens. We then out-line theories of organizational learning (and unlearning) from disasters and the impact on humanitarian operations. Subse-quently, we theorize the role of middle managers in humanitarian operations, which is the main focus of our paper. Themain methodology incorporates a hybrid of two techniques for root cause analysis, applied to two related case studies.The cases were specifically selected as, despite occurring twenty years apart, there are many similarities in the chain ofcausation and supporting factors, potentially suggesting that adequate learning from experience and failures is not occur-ring. This provides a novel learning experience within the HOM paradigm. Hence, the proposed approach is based on amultilevel structure that facilitates the operationalization of learning from rare events in humanitarian operations. Theresults show that we are able to provide an environment for multiple interpretations and effective learning, with emphasison middle managers within a humanitarian operations and crisis/disaster management context

Representing fire emergency response knowledge through a domain modelling approach

When any kind of emergency occurs, Emergency Responders (ERs) from different emergency organizations (such as police, fire, ambulance and municipality) have to act concurrently to solve the difficulties which are posed at the emergency site. Moreover, during the immediate response, getting the awareness of the situation is very crucial for ERs to lessen the emergency impacts such as loss of life and damage to the property. However, this can only be done when ERs get access to the information in timely manner and share the acquired information with one another during emergency response. Despite ERs share knowledge with one another they have to use same concepts to obtain the semantic understanding in order to perform actions for achieving goals. In addition, the success of the emergency response lies on the ERs’ coordination and their interoperability (information systems interoperability). Therefore, in this paper we provide a formal structure to the concepts that describes the building fire emergency management domain in order to provide a common semantic understanding for ERs. In our study, domain modelling approach has been used to represent the concepts formally. The presented results combine the knowledge from semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and through literature review. The developed domain model includes four aspects: i) characteristics of the event, ii) actors involved, iii) goals to achieve and iv) Building characteristics. Besides, the developed domain model serves as a foundational component to create an information system to unify, facilitate and expedite access to emergency related information for facilitating data exchange format and enable knowledge sharing among different emergency actors

Disaster management from a POM perspective : mapping a new domain

We have reviewed disaster management research papers published in major operations management, management science, operations research, supply chain management and transportation/ logistics journals. In reviewing these papers our objective is to assess and present the macro level “architectural blue print” of disaster management research with the hope that it will attract new researchers and motivate established researchers to contribute to this important field. The secondary objective is to bring this disaster research to the attention of disaster administrators so that disasters are managed more efficiently and more effectively. We have mapped the disaster management research on the following five attributes of a disaster: (1) Disaster Management Function (decision making process, prevention and mitigation, evacuation, humanitarian logistics, casualty management, and recovery and restoration), (2) Time of Disaster (before, during and after), (3) Type of Disaster (accidents, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, landslides, terrorism and wildfires etc.), (4) Data Type (Field and Archival data, Real data and Hypothetical data), and (5) Data Analysis Technique (bidding models, decision analysis, expert systems, fuzzy system analysis, game theory, heuristics, mathematical programming, network flow models, queuing theory, simulation and statistical analysis). We have done cross tabulations of data among these five parameters to gain greater insights in disaster research. Recommendations for future research are provided