How volunteered geographic information can be integrated into emergency management practice? : first lessons learned from an urban fire simulation in the city of Coimbra

In the past few years, volunteered geographic information (VGI) has emerged as a new resource for improving the management of emergencies. Despite the growing body of research dedicated to the use of VGI in crisis management, studies are still needed that systematically investigate the incorporation of VGI into practical emergency management. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a research design for investigating and planning the incorporation of VGI into work practices and decision-making of emergency agencies by means of simulation exercises. Furthermore, first lessons are drawn from a field study performed within a simulation exercise of an urban fire in Coimbra, Portugal, implemented together with local civil protection agents. Emergency management practitioners identified a high potential in the pictures taken in-situ by volunteers for improving situational awareness and supporting decision-making. They also pointed out to challenges associated to processing VGI and filtering high-value information in real-time

From Common Operational Picture to Common Situational Understanding : A Framework for Information Sharing in Multi-Organizational Emergency Management

Complex emergencies such as natural disasters are increasing in frequency and scope, in all regions of the world. These emergencies have devastating impacts on people, property, and the environment. Responding to these events and reducing their impact requires that emergency management organizations (EMOs) collaborate in their operations. Complex emergencies require extraordinary efforts from EMOs and often should be handled beyond ordinary routines and structures. Such operations involving multiple stakeholders are typically characterized by inadequate information sharing, decision-making problems, limited situational awareness (SA), and lack of common situational understanding. Despite a high volume of research on these challenges, evaluations from complex disasters and large-scale exercises document that there are still several unsolved issues related to information sharing and the development of common situational understanding. Examples here include fulfillment of heterogeneous information needs, employment of different communication tools and processes with limited interoperability, and information overload resulting from a lack of mechanisms for filtering irrelevant information. Multi-organizational emergency management is an established area of research focusing on how to successfully collaborate and share information for developing common situational understanding. However, the level of complexity and situational dependencies between the involved EMOs create challenges for researchers. An important element for efficient collaboration and information sharing is building and maintaining a common operational picture (COP). Sharing important information is a key element in emergency management involving several EMOs, and both static and dynamic information must be accessible to perform tasks effectively during emergency response. To be proactive and mitigate the emergency impacts requires up-to-date information, both factual information via the COP and the ability to share interpretations and implications through using a communication system for rapid verbal negotiation. The overall research objective is to investigate how stakeholders perceive and develop SA and COP, and to explore and understand key requirements for stakeholders to develop a common situational understanding in complex multi-organizational emergency management.publishedVersio

eStorys: A visual storyboard system supporting back-channel communication for emergencies

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Journal of Visual Languages & Computing. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2010 Elsevier B.V.In this paper we present a new web mashup system for helping people and professionals to retrieve information about emergencies and disasters. Today, the use of the web during emergencies, is confirmed by the employment of systems like Flickr, Twitter or Facebook as demonstrated in the cases of Hurricane Katrina, the July 7, 2005 London bombings, and the April 16, 2007 shootings at Virginia Polytechnic University. Many pieces of information are currently available on the web that can be useful for emergency purposes and range from messages on forums and blogs to georeferenced photos. We present here a system that, by mixing information available on the web, is able to help both people and emergency professionals in rapidly obtaining data on emergency situations by using multiple web channels. In this paper we introduce a visual system, providing a combination of tools that demonstrated to be effective in such emergency situations, such as spatio/temporal search features, recommendation and filtering tools, and storyboards. We demonstrated the efficacy of our system by means of an analytic evaluation (comparing it with others available on the web), an usability evaluation made by expert users (students adequately trained) and an experimental evaluation with 34 participants.Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and Banco Santander

A Survey on IT-Techniques for a Dynamic Emergency Management in Large Infrastructures

This deliverable is a survey on the IT techniques that are relevant to the three use cases of the project EMILI. It describes the state-of-the-art in four complementary IT areas: Data cleansing, supervisory control and data acquisition, wireless sensor networks and complex event processing. Even though the deliverable’s authors have tried to avoid a too technical language and have tried to explain every concept referred to, the deliverable might seem rather technical to readers so far little familiar with the techniques it describes

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