Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio

Quantify resilience enhancement of UTS through exploiting connect community and internet of everything emerging technologies

This work aims at investigating and quantifying the Urban Transport System (UTS) resilience enhancement enabled by the adoption of emerging technology such as Internet of Everything (IoE) and the new trend of the Connected Community (CC). A conceptual extension of Functional Resonance Analysis Method (FRAM) and its formalization have been proposed and used to model UTS complexity. The scope is to identify the system functions and their interdependencies with a particular focus on those that have a relation and impact on people and communities. Network analysis techniques have been applied to the FRAM model to identify and estimate the most critical community-related functions. The notion of Variability Rate (VR) has been defined as the amount of output variability generated by an upstream function that can be tolerated/absorbed by a downstream function, without significantly increasing of its subsequent output variability. A fuzzy based quantification of the VR on expert judgment has been developed when quantitative data are not available. Our approach has been applied to a critical scenario (water bomb/flash flooding) considering two cases: when UTS has CC and IoE implemented or not. The results show a remarkable VR enhancement if CC and IoE are deploye

Negotiating the 'trading zone'. Creating a shared information infrastructure in the Dutch public safety sector

Our main concern in this article is whether nation-wide information technology (IT) infrastructures or systems in emergency response and disaster management are the solution to the communication problems the safety sector suffers from. It has been argued that implementing nation-wide IT systems will help to create shared cognition and situational awareness among relief workers. We put this claim to the test by presenting a case study on the introduction of ‘netcentric work’, an IT system-based platform aiming at the creation of situational awareness for professionals in the safety sector in the Netherlands. The outcome of our research is that the negotiation with relevant stakeholders by the Dutch government has lead to the emergence of several fragmented IT systems. It becomes clear that a top-down implementation strategy for a single nation-wide information system will fail because of the fragmentation of the Dutch safety sector it is supposed to be a solution to. As the US safety sector is at least as fragmented as its Dutch counterpart, this may serve as a caveat for the introduction of similar IT systems in the US

A dual perspective towards building resilience in manufacturing organizations

Modern manufacturing organizations exist in the most complex and competitive environment the world has ever known. This environment consists of demanding customers, enabling, but resource intensive Industry 4.0 technology, dynamic regulations, geopolitical perturbations, and innovative, ever-expanding global competition. Successful manufacturing organizations must excel in this environment while facing emergent disruptions generated as biproducts of complex man-made and natural systems. The research presented in this thesis provides a novel two-sided approach to the creation of resilience in the modern manufacturing organization. First, the systems engineering method is demonstrated as the qualitative framework for building literature-derived organizational resilience factors into organizational structures under a life cycle perspective. A quantitative analysis of industry expert survey data through graph theory and matrix approach is presented second to prioritize resilience factors for strategic practical implementation

Supply Chain

Traditionally supply chain management has meant factories, assembly lines, warehouses, transportation vehicles, and time sheets. Modern supply chain management is a highly complex, multidimensional problem set with virtually endless number of variables for optimization. An Internet enabled supply chain may have just-in-time delivery, precise inventory visibility, and up-to-the-minute distribution-tracking capabilities. Technology advances have enabled supply chains to become strategic weapons that can help avoid disasters, lower costs, and make money. From internal enterprise processes to external business transactions with suppliers, transporters, channels and end-users marks the wide range of challenges researchers have to handle. The aim of this book is at revealing and illustrating this diversity in terms of scientific and theoretical fundamentals, prevailing concepts as well as current practical applications

Evaluator perceptions of NGO performance in disasters:Meeting multiple institutional demands in humanitarian aid projects

Providing aid in times of increasing humanitarian need, limited budgets, and mounting security risks is challenging. This paper explores in what organisational circumstances evaluators judge, positively and negatively, the performance of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) in response to disasters triggered by natural hazards. It assesses whether and how, as perceived by expert evaluators, CARE and Oxfam successfully met multiple institutional requirements concerning beneficiary needs and organisational demands. It utilises the Competing Values Framework to analyse evaluator statements about project performance and organisational control and flexibility issues, using seven CARE and four Oxfam evaluation reports from 2005-11. The reports are compared using fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The resulting configurations show that positive evaluations of an INGO's internal and external flexibility relate to satisfying beneficiary needs and organisational demands, whereas negative evaluations of external flexibility pertain to not meeting beneficiary needs and negative statements about internal control concerning not fulfilling organisational demands

A framework for evaluating the effectiveness of flood emergency management systems in Europe

Calls for enhancing societal resilience to flooding are echoed across Europe alongside mounting evidence that flood risk will increase in response to climate change amongst other risk-enhancing factors. At a time where it is now widely accepted that flooding cannot be fully prevented, resilience discourse in public policy stresses the importance of improving societal capacities to absorb and recover from flood events. Flood emergency management has thus emerged as a crucial strategy in flood risk management. However, the extent to which emergency management supports societal resilience is dependent on the effectiveness of governance and performance in practice. Drawing from the extensive body of literature documenting the success conditions of so-called effective emergency management more broadly, this study formulates an evaluation framework specifically tailored to the study of Flood Emergency Management Systems (FEMS) in Europe. Applying this framework, this research performs a cross-country comparison of FEMS in the Netherlands, England, Poland, France, and Sweden. Important differences are observed in how FEMS have evolved in relation to differing contextual backgrounds (political, cultural, administrative and socio-economic) and exposures to flood hazard. Whereas the organization and coordination of actors are functioning effectively, other aspects of effective FEMS are relatively under-developed in several countries, such as provisions for institutional learning, recovery-based activities and community preparedness. Drawing from examples of good practice, this paper provides a critical reflection on the opportunities and constraints to enhancing the effectiveness of FEMS in Europe

The Impacts of Team-based Care on Primary Care Quality: Evaluating Evidence from the State Innovation Model (SIM) Program in Connecticut

In 2013, CMMI awarded Connecticut a $45 million State Innovation Model (SIM) grant to support healthcare payment and delivery model reforms aimed at improving health system performance, increasing quality of care, and decreasing costs. In the five years that followed, the Office of Healthcare Strategy led care delivery changes across the state with an emphasis on bolstering the role of primary care. In particular, many of these efforts centered on furthering team-based, patient-centered models, such as the patient-centered medical home (PCMH). In this dissertation, I use physician, patient, clinical outcome, and organizational data from the SIM project to explore the impact of team-based primary care on three areas of healthcare quality. In the first paper of this dissertation, I explore the relationship between team-based care and physician burnout using physician-reported survey data. I hypothesized that primary care physicians would exhibit greater levels of burnout compared to specialists, and that those physicians who were practicing under team-based models would be less likely to report burnout. I conducted both multivariate linear regression analyses and inverse probability weighting with regression adjustment to test this hypothesis, evaluating the impact of care teams, PCMH-designation, and ACO-designation on burnout. Primary care physicians were more burnt out than specialists. In addition, I found that while care teams did reduce physician burnout, models that encouraged the use of care teams, including PCMHs and ACOs, did not. In addition to informing the literature on team-based primary care, this paper advances the evidence base on physician burnout, an increasingly critical area to understand given the COVID-19 pandemic and its exacerbation of existing physician burnout challenges. In the second paper, I assess the relationship between four medical home organizational characteristics – organization size & affiliation, payment reform experience, team-based care, and patient tracking and reporting – and antihypertensive medication monitoring using fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). I hypothesized that team-based care would be positively associated with antihypertensive treatment monitoring. However, I found that primary care organizations that had a commitment to IT programs, care management protocols, and policies to track their patient populations were most likely to perform antihypertensive monitoring. This chapter used data from an organizational-level practice survey and clinical outcome data, and served to assess clinical quality among organizations participating in the SIM project. In the third chapter of this dissertation, I assess the impact of team-based care on four summary measures of patient experience: timely care, communication, coordination, and courteous staff. In addition, I explore whether the relationship between care teams and patient experience differed by a patient’s health status. I hypothesized that team-based models of primary care would be positively associated with all four domains of patient care experiences, with the strongest effects observed for the domains of communication and courteous staff. I found that teams had a small, but statistically significant, impact on both the communication and courteous staff measures, with the strongest association between teams and courteous staff. In addition, I observed that teams had the largest impact on patients in poor health for the courteous staff measure, but did not have differential effects of teams among chronically ill patients for the other three outcomes. Taken together, the papers presented in this dissertation serve three purposes; they 1) evaluate key metrics for policymaking purposes in the state of Connecticut; 2) inform the evidence base around the impact of delivery reform on physicians, patients, and other key stakeholders and 3) contribute to the peer-reviewed literature on team-based care

Flexible Decision Control in an Autonomous Trading Agent

An autonomous trading agent is a complex piece of software that must operate in a competitive economic environment and support a research agenda. We describe the structure of decision processes in the MinneTAC trading agent, focusing on the use of evaluators – configurable, composable modules for data analysis and prediction that are chained together at runtime to support agent decision-making. Through a set of examples, we show how this structure supports sales and procurement decisions, and how those decision processes can be modified in useful ways by changing evaluator configurations. To put this work in context, we also report on results of an informal survey of agent design approaches among the competitors in the Trading Agent Competition for Supply Chain Management (TAC SCM).autonomous trading agent;decision processes