Disaster management in industrial areas: perspectives, challenges and future research

Purpose: In most countries, development, growth, and sustenance of industrial facilities are given utmost importance due to the influence in the socio-economic development of the country. Therefore, special economic zones, or industrial areas or industrial cities are developed in order to provide the required services for the sustained operation of such facilities. Such facilities not only provide a prolonged economic support to the country but it also helps in the societal aspects as well by providing livelihood to thousands of people. Therefore, any disaster in any of the facilities in the industrial area will have a significant impact on the population, facilities, the economy, and threatens the sustainability of the operations. This paper provides review of such literature that focus on theory and practice of disaster management in industrial cities. Design/methodology/approach: In the paper, content analysis method is used in order to elicit the insights of the literature available. The methodology uses search methods, literature segregation and developing the current knowledge on different phases of industrial disaster management. Findings: It is found that the research is done in all phases of disaster management, namely, preventive phase, reactive phase and corrective phase. The research in each of these areas are focused on four main aspects, which are facilities, resources, support systems and modeling. Nevertheless, the research in the industrial cities is insignificant. Moreover, the modeling part does not explicitly consider the nature of industrial cities, where many of the chemical and chemical processing can be highly flammable thus creating a very large disaster impact. Some research is focused at an individual plant and scaled up to the industrial cities. The modeling part is weak in terms of comprehensively analyzing and assisting disaster management in the industrial cities. Originality/value: The comprehensive review using content analysis on disaster management is presented here. The review helps the researchers to understand the gap in the literature in order to extend further research for disaster management in large scale industrial cities.Peer Reviewe

Resource Planning in Disaster Response - Decision Support Models and Methodologies

Managing the response to natural, man-made, and technical disasters is becoming increasingly important in the light of climate change, globalization, urbanization, and growing conflicts. Sudden onset disasters are typically characterized by high stakes, time pressure, and uncertain, conflicting or lacking information. Since the planning and management of response is a complex task, decision makers of aid organizations can thus benefit from decision support methods and tools. A key task is the joint allocation of rescue units and the scheduling of incidents under different conditions of collaboration. The authors present an approach to support decision makers who coordinate response units by (a) suggesting mathematical formulations of decision models, (b) providing heuristic solution procedures, and (c) evaluating the heuristics against both current best practice behavior and optimal solutions. The computational experiments show that, for the generated problem instances, (1) current best practice behavior can be improved substantially by our heuristics, (2) the gap between heuristic and optimal solutions is very narrow for instances without collaboration, and (3) the described heuristics are capable of providing solutions for all generated instances in less than a second on a state-of-the-art PC

Disaster management in industrial areas: Perspectives, challenges and future research

Purpose: In most countries, development, growth, and sustenance of industrial facilities are given utmost importance due to the influence in the socio-economic development of the country. Therefore, special economic zones, or industrial areas or industrial cities are developed in order to provide the required services for the sustained operation of such facilities. Such facilities not only provide a prolonged economic support to the country but it also helps in the societal aspects as well by providing livelihood to thousands of people. Therefore, any disaster in any of the facilities in the industrial area will have a significant impact on the population, facilities, the economy, and threatens the sustainability of the operations. This paper provides review of such literature that focus on theory and practice of disaster management in industrial cities. Design/methodology/approach: In the paper, content analysis method is used in order to elicit the insights of the literature available. The methodology uses search methods, literature segregation and developing the current knowledge on different phases of industrial disaster management. Findings: It is found that the research is done in all phases of disaster management, namely, preventive phase, reactive phase and corrective phase. The research in each of these areas are focused on four main aspects, which are facilities, resources, support systems and modeling. Nevertheless, the research in the industrial cities is insignificant. Moreover, the modeling part does not explicitly consider the nature of industrial cities, where many of the chemical and chemical processing can be highly flammable thus creating a very large disaster impact. Some research is focused at an individual plant and scaled up to the industrial cities. The modeling part is weak in terms of comprehensively analyzing and assisting disaster management in the industrial cities. Originality/value: The comprehensive review using content analysis on disaster management is presented here. The review helps the researchers to understand the gap in the literature in order to extend further research for disaster management in large scale industrial cities.Scopu

ELITE SELECTION AND A CULTURE OF TRADITION IN FDNY SPECIAL OPERATIONS

The New York City Fire Department (FDNY) is a brand name in public safety. Like many high-reliability organizations, its specialized units carry out advanced and technical work. Expanded mission tasking, compensation, and training have made these assignments a career ladder, but the antiquated selection and assignment policy threaten the integrity of the selection and recruitment process. FDNY may improve its selection for special operations based on what similar organizations do. By reviewing them, specifically the armed services and commercial diving, two high-reliability organizations, this study compares selection methods to identify validated testing, determine criteria, and develop a selection construct that can maintain or improve current selection policies. Findings reveal that cognitive ability testing, physical ability assessments, and in-depth character evaluations used to make personnel selections could enhance FDNY. This thesis recommends that further development of selection models would be beneficial for the organization and defend the FDNY against claims of bias, favoritism, and discrimination. Lack of validation has already cost New York City and the FDNY legal fines. Validation studies identify areas of selection that need improvement so the FDNY could reinforce traditional selection criteria and establish new and validated ways of identifying and cultivating talent with the fire service.Civilian, FDNYApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Communication and Control in Collaborative UAVs: Recent Advances and Future Trends

The recent progress in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) technology has significantly advanced UAV-based applications for military, civil, and commercial domains. Nevertheless, the challenges of establishing high-speed communication links, flexible control strategies, and developing efficient collaborative decision-making algorithms for a swarm of UAVs limit their autonomy, robustness, and reliability. Thus, a growing focus has been witnessed on collaborative communication to allow a swarm of UAVs to coordinate and communicate autonomously for the cooperative completion of tasks in a short time with improved efficiency and reliability. This work presents a comprehensive review of collaborative communication in a multi-UAV system. We thoroughly discuss the characteristics of intelligent UAVs and their communication and control requirements for autonomous collaboration and coordination. Moreover, we review various UAV collaboration tasks, summarize the applications of UAV swarm networks for dense urban environments and present the use case scenarios to highlight the current developments of UAV-based applications in various domains. Finally, we identify several exciting future research direction that needs attention for advancing the research in collaborative UAVs

Optimal Control of Parallel Queues for Managing Volunteer Convergence

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163497/2/poms13224.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163497/1/poms13224_am.pd

School Safety Manual for Bennett Elementary

This project examined preventative and responsive safety plans that improved the educational climate of schools through the successful elimination of negative physical, mental and emotional threats to students and employees. The review of current research found that schools were more successful in reducing or eliminating safety threats when a comprehensive school safety program was collaboratively developed and implemented Furthermore, a comprehensive school safety plan that was made easily accessible to every member of the staff and that was assessed continuously also played a vital role to the success of the school safety plan. Included is a comprehensive school safety manual that focused on providing staff, students and parents with. preventative and responsive methods for eliminating safety threats in the school. The manual used various forms of written expectations, safety procedures and preventative and proactive discipline interventions. The overall purpose of the manual was to ensure the academic and social success of students through maintaining a safe and positive school climate for students, staff and parents