Decision Support for the Optimal Coordination of Spontaneous Volunteers in Disaster Relief

When responding to natural disasters, professional relief units are often supported by many volunteers which are not affiliated to humanitarian organizations. The effective coordination of these volunteers is crucial to leverage their capabilities and to avoid conflicts with professional relief units. In this paper, we empirically identify key requirements that professional relief units pose on this coordination. Based on these requirements, we suggest a decision model. We computationally solve a real-world instance of the model and empirically validate the computed solution in interviews with practitioners. Our results show that the suggested model allows for solving volunteer coordination tasks of realistic size near-optimally within short time, with the determined solution being well accepted by practitioners. We also describe in this article how the suggested decision support model is integrated in the volunteer coordination system which we develop in joint cooperation with a disaster management authority and a software development company

The social preferences of local citizens and spontaneous volunteerism during disaster relief operations

Existing studies on disaster relief operations (DRO) pay limited attention to acts of spontaneous volunteerism by local citizens in the aftermath of disasters. The purpose of this paper is to explore how social preferences motivate citizens to help during post-disaster situations; above and beyond their own self-regarding interests. The paper begins by synthesizing the literature on social preferences from the field of behavioral economics and social psychology with the discourse surrounding behavioral operations management and humanitarian operations management (HOM). By doing so, we identify the motivators, enablers and barriers of local citizen response during disaster relief operations. These factors inform a theoretical framework of the social preferences motivating spontaneous volunteerism in post-disaster situations. We evidence facets of the framework using archival and unstructured data retrieved from Twitter feeds generated by local citizens during the floods that hit Chennai, India in 2015. Our model highlights the importance of individual level action during disaster relief operations and the enabling role of social media as a coordination mechanism for such efforts

Cross-Border Collaboration in Disaster Management

Wenn sich eine Katastrophe ereignet, ist eine schnelle und koordinierte Reaktion der verschiedenen Krisenmanagementakteure unerlässlich, um die vorhandenen Ressourcen bestmöglich einzusetzen und somit ihre Auswirkungen zu begrenzen. Dieses Zusammenspiel wird erschwert, wenn die Katastrophe mehrere Länder betrifft. Neben den unterschiedlichen Regelungen und Systemen spielen dann auch kulturelle Einflüsse wie Sprachbarrieren oder mangelndes Vertrauen eine entscheidende Rolle. Obwohl die Resilienz von Grenzgebieten von fundamentaler Bedeutung ist, wird diese in der wissenschaftlichen Literatur immer noch unterschätzt. Im ersten Teil dieser Arbeit wird ein agentenbasiertes Modell zur Untersuchung der organisationsübergreifenden Zusammenarbeit bei Katastropheneinsätzen in einer Grenzregion vorgestellt. Indem Kommunikationsprotokolle aus der Literatur auf den Kontext der grenzüberschreitenden Kooperation erweitert werden, analysiert das Modell die globale Dynamik, die aus lokalen Entscheidungen resultiert. Ein szenariobasierter Ansatz zeigt, dass höheres Vertrauen zwar zu signifikant besseren Versorgungsraten führt, der Abbau von Sprachbarrieren aber noch effizienter ist. Insbesondere gilt dies, wenn die Akteure die Sprache des Nachbarlandes direkt sprechen, anstatt sich auf eine allgemeine Lingua franca zu verlassen. Die Untersuchung der Koordination zeigt, dass Informationsflüsse entlang der hierarchischen Organisationsstruktur am erfolgreichsten sind, während spontane Zusammenarbeit durch ein etabliertes informelles Netzwerk privater Kontakte den Informationsaustausch ergänzen und in dynamischen Umgebungen einen Vorteil darstellen kann. Darüber hinaus verdoppelt die Einbindung von Spontanfreiwilligen den Koordinationsaufwand. Die Koordination über beide Dimensionen, zum einen die Einbindung in den Katastrophenschutz und zum anderen über Grenzen hinweg, führt jedoch zu einer optimalen Versorgung der betroffenen Bevölkerung. In einem zweiten Teil stellt diese Arbeit ein innovatives empirisches Studiendesign vor, das auf transnationalem Sozialkapital und Weiners Motivationstheorie basiert, um prosoziale Beziehungen der Menschen über nationale Grenzen hinweg zu quantifizieren. Regionale Beziehungen innerhalb der Länder werden dabei als Vergleichsbasis genommen. Die mittels repräsentativer Telefoninterviews in Deutschland, Frankreich und der deutsch-französischen Grenzregion erhobenen Daten belegen die Hypothese, dass das Sozialkapital und die Hilfsbereitschaft über die deutsch-französische Grenze hinweg mindestens so hoch ist wie das regionale Sozialkapital und die Hilfsbereitschaft innerhalb der jeweiligen Länder. Folglich liefert die Arbeit wertvolle Erkenntnisse für Entscheidungsträger, um wesentliche Barrieren in der grenzüberschreitenden Kooperation abzubauen und damit die grenzüberschreitende Resilienz bei zukünftigen Katastrophen zu verbessern. Implikationen für die heutige Zeit in Bezug auf Globalisierung versus aufkommendem Nationalismus sowie Auswirkungen von (Natur-) Katastrophen werden diskutiert

The Behavior of Spontaneous Volunteers: A Discrete Choice Experiment on the Decision to Help

Modern communication technology has enabled new ways to exchange information and is one of the main drivers for citizens’ participation in disaster response. During the last decades, so-called spontaneous volunteers have become an important resource in coping with disasters. However, their unpredictable behavior has also led to several problems. Disaster managers urgently need insights into volunteers’ behavior to effectively use the offered potential. To gain and provide these insights into explaining what drives the decision to help, we performed a discrete choice experiment based on previously identified behavior-affecting attributes. Our results indicate that attributes like the scale of the disaster and the media coverage are among the most important factors in the decision to help. The model correctly predicts volunteers’ scenario-specific decisions with an accuracy of 65\%. Hence, the experiment offers valuable insights into volunteers’ behaviors for disaster research and is a sound foundation for decision support for disaster management

Cross-Border Collaboration in Disaster Management

In recent years, disaster events spreading across national borders have increased, which requires improved collaboration between countries. By means of an agent-based simulation and an empirical study, this thesis provides valuable insights for decision-makers in order to overcome barriers in cross-border cooperation and thus, enhance borderland resilience for future events. Finally, implications for today's world in terms of globalization versus emerging nationalism are discussed

Faith-Based Organizations in Disaster Relief: Locally-Based Strategies for a Higher Demand Future

Due to the effects of climate change, natural disasters are beginning to occur more frequently and are causing greater destruction. The American disaster relief system currently relies on a nationally focused, top-down approach. As resources become more and more limited, it is expected that disaster relief fatigue will occur, required local communities to take a larger role in their disaster relief processes. Right now, major player in both local and national disaster relief are Faith-Based Organizations (FBOs), who provide many crucial services before and after disasters This paper develops an economic model of the rebuilding stage of disaster relief in order to examine the prioritization and resource allocation problems it faces. Through a series of case studies, the model is applied and used to point out a series of systems and methods by which local FBOs have, and might further be able to play larger and more significant roles in disaster relief

Emergent Groups for Emergency Response – Theoretical Foundations and Information Design Implications

Experience from recent crises strongly suggests that involvement of ordinary individuals or groups of people in emergency response is a critical contribution to large-scale disaster relief, especially at the beginning of the crisis. While not meant to displace response from trained authorities, they should not be regarded as a liability but as immediately available assets. Instead, the issue is to find ways to support these emergent groups in the middle of a large-scale disaster, when formal responders have yet to arrive at the scene and information is scarce, confusing, depressing, and not informative enough to support rescue work. In this paper, we investigate theoretical foundations that explain the motivational basis, group dynamics and information and communication needs of a helping community. Given the central role of information and communication technologies (ICT), we suggest how critical information should be gathered, presented and disseminated using a workflowbased template design to assist emergent groups to help others

Developing a Framework for Stigmergic Human Collaboration with Technology Tools: Cases in Emergency Response

Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), particularly social media and geographic information systems (GIS), have become a transformational force in emergency response. Social media enables ad hoc collaboration, providing timely, useful information dissemination and sharing, and helping to overcome limitations of time and place. Geographic information systems increase the level of situation awareness, serving geospatial data using interactive maps, animations, and computer generated imagery derived from sophisticated global remote sensing systems. Digital workspaces bring these technologies together and contribute to meeting ad hoc and formal emergency response challenges through their affordances of situation awareness and mass collaboration. Distributed ICTs that enable ad hoc emergency response via digital workspaces have arguably made traditional top-down system deployments less relevant in certain situations, including emergency response (Merrill, 2009; Heylighen, 2007a, b). Heylighen (2014, 2007a, b) theorizes that human cognitive stigmergy explains some self-organizing characteristics of ad hoc systems. Elliott (2007) identifies cognitive stigmergy as a factor in mass collaborations supported by digital workspaces. Stigmergy, a term from biology, refers to the phenomenon of self-organizing systems with agents that coordinate via perceived changes in the environment rather than direct communication. In the present research, ad hoc emergency response is examined through the lens of human cognitive stigmergy. The basic assertion is that ICTs and stigmergy together make possible highly effective ad hoc collaborations in circumstances where more typical collaborative methods break down. The research is organized into three essays: an in-depth analysis of the development and deployment of the Ushahidi emergency response software platform, a comparison of the emergency response ICTs used for emergency response during Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and a process model developed from the case studies and relevant academic literature is described

Bot-Based Emergency Software Applications for Natural Disaster Situations

Upon a serious emergency situation such as a natural disaster, people quickly try to call their friends and family with the software they use every day. On the other hand, people also tend to participate as a volunteer for rescue purposes. It is unlikely and impractical for these people to download and learn to use an application specially designed for aid processes. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of including bots, which provide a mechanism to get inside the software that people use daily, to develop emergency software applications designed to be used by victims and volunteers during stressful situations. In such situations, it is necessary to achieve efficiency, scalability, fault tolerance, elasticity, and mobility between data centers. We evaluate three bot-based applications. The first one, named Jayma, sends information about affected people during the natural disaster to a network of contacts. The second bot-based application, Ayni, manages and assigns tasks to volunteers. The third bot-based application named Rimay registers volunteers and manages campaigns and emergency tasks. The applications are built using common practice for distributed software architecture design. Most of the components forming the architecture are from existing public domain software, and some components are even consumed as an external service as in the case of Telegram. Moreover, the applications are executed on commodity hardware usually available from universities. We evaluate the applications to detect critical tasks, bottlenecks, and the most critical resource. Results show that Ayni and Rimay tend to saturate the CPU faster than other resources. Meanwhile, the RAM memory tends to reach the highest utilization level in the Jayma application.Fil: Ovando Leon, Gabriel. Universidad de Santiago de Chile; ChileFil: Veas Castillo, Luis. Universidad de Santiago de Chile; ChileFil: Gil Costa, Graciela Verónica. Universidad Nacional de San Luis; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - San Luis; ArgentinaFil: Marin, Mauricio. Universidad de Santiago de Chile; Chil