Disaster management and its economic implications

Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, aktuelle Forschungsschwerpunkte im Bereich des Katastrophenmanagements in der Operational Research Literatur aufzuzeigen. Katastrophenmanagement umfasst in diesem Zusammenhang einerseits Naturkatastrophen wie geophysikalische und hydro-meteorologische Katastrophen, technologische Katastrophen wie industrielle Unfälle, Transportunfälle und sonstige Unfälle, und andererseits die verschiedenen Formen des Terrorismus, allgemeinen Terrorismus sowie Bioterrorismus. Da die Anzahl und das Ausmaß von Katastrophen immer weiter zunehmen ist auch eine immer größere Notwendigkeit für die Entwicklung, den Einsatz und die wirtschaftliche Beurteilung der jeweiligen Strategien gegeben. Der erste Teil dieser Arbeit gibt einen Überblick über die Literatur im Bereich des Katastrophenmanagements und umfasst Simulation, Katastrophenmanagement in Krankenhäusern und die Rolle von Versicherungen im Katastrophenmanagementprozess. Im zweiten Teil wird eine Taxonomie entwickelt, deren Kategorien auf den Modellen und Ergebnissen der Literatur beruhen. Einerseits werden allgemeine Modelleigenschaften wie die Ebene im Katastrophenmanagementprozess, der Modelltyp und die Anwendungsgebiete der Modelle untersucht. Andererseits stellen die Art der Intervention und die Anwendbarkeit für die unterschiedlichen Katastrophenklassen weitere Kategorien der Taxonomie dar. Es wurden 90 Artikel, die beispielhaft für die Forschungsrichtungen im Bereich des Katastrophenmanagements der letzten 25 Jahre stehen, ausgewählt, und entsprechend den jeweiligen Kategorien der Taxonomie zugeordnet. Das Hauptaugenmerk der Taxonomie liegt auf der wirtschaftlichen Analyse, die wirksamkeitsbezogene, ressourcenbezogene und kostenbezogene Parameter umfasst. Es wird gezeigt ob und welche wirtschaftliche Analyse wie beispielsweise die Kosten-Nutzwert- Analyse, die Kosten-Wirksamkeits-Analyse und die Kosten-Nutzen-Analyse angewendet wird um die in den Artikeln beschriebenen Interventionen zu evaluieren. Es wird gezeigt, dass erhebliche Verbesserungen für die verschiedenen Katastrophentypen und in den verschiedenen Situationen erzielt werden können. Eingeschränkte Datenverfügbarkeit schränkt in vielen Fällen die Einsetzbarkeit der Modelle in realen Situationen ein. Im Allgemeinen ist erkennbar, dass Kooperation und Koordination zwischen den beteiligten Einheiten ausschlaggebend für den zeitgerechten und effizienten Einsatz der knappen Ressourcen sind. Oftmals erzielt der gemeinsame Einsatz mehrerer Maßnahme ein deutlich besseres Ergebnis als der Einsatz von lediglich einem einzigen Instrument. Die Taxonomie unterstreicht dass trotz der großen Fülle an Literatur im Bereich des Katastrophenmanagements nur wenige Autoren auf die Kosten-Nutzwert-Analyse, die Kosten-Wirksamkeits-Analyse und die Kosten-Nutzen-Analyse als Hilfsmittel zur wirtschaftlichen Analyse zurückgreifen. In Zukunft, um Interventionen erfolgreich evaluieren zu können oder die beste aus mehreren Interventionen bestimmen zu können wird es immer wichtiger werden, diese Art von wirtschaftlichen Analysen anzuwenden.This thesis intends to demonstrate current research directions in the field of disaster management in the Operational Research literature. Disaster management in this context comprises the management of natural, such as geophysical and hydro-meteorological, and technological disasters, such as industrial accidents, transportation accidents, and miscellaneous accidents, as well as the management of the different terrorism forms, general terrorism and bioterrorism. As the occurrence of disasters is getting more and more frequent and the accumulated loss of these events is getting higher and higher, there is a strong need for the development, implication and economic evaluation of strategies to counter these disasters. In the first part of the thesis, a general overview of the literature is given, including a focus on simulation, disaster management in hospitals, and the role of insurances in the disaster management process. The second part encompasses the taxonomy which focuses on models and outcomes presented in the literature. As a result of the review of the literature, appropriate categories for the disaster management taxonomy are derived. On the one hand, an overview of general model features, i.e., the level of disaster management, model type and methods of application is given. On the other hand, the type of intervention used and the practicability for different disaster types are discussed. 90 papers, illustrative main examples of the research directions of the last 25 years, were selected for deeper investigation and classified according to the main criteria analyzed in the articles. The main focus of the taxonomy lies on the economic analysis, which encompasses effectiveness-related, resource-related, and cost-related parameters and shows the type of economic analysis used in the literature. We analyze whether economic analysis, i.e., costutility, cost-effectiveness, and cost-benefit are used to investigate different interventions and what type of analysis has been chosen by the authors. Policy implications and results show that considerable improvements can be achieved for different disastrous events and in different situations. Limited data availability constrains the outcomes of the models and their applicability to real-world situations. In general, cooperation and coordination of the entities involved are crucial to guarantee timely and efficient assignment of scarce resources. Furthermore, different authors confirm that a combination of various measures often achieves a better outcome than if tools are used autonomously. The taxonomy has underlined that although there exists a vast disaster management literature dealing with various problems related to mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery from disasters, there are only a few authors evaluating the actions taken through economic analyses such cost-utility, cost-effectiveness, or cost-benefit analysis. In the future, to be able to evaluate interventions, or to figure out the most effective intervention among several interventions, it is crucial to stronger rely on the abovementioned economic analyses

Intelligent evacuation management systems: A review

Crowd and evacuation management have been active areas of research and study in the recent past. Various developments continue to take place in the process of efficient evacuation of crowds in mass gatherings. This article is intended to provide a review of intelligent evacuation management systems covering the aspects of crowd monitoring, crowd disaster prediction, evacuation modelling, and evacuation path guidelines. Soft computing approaches play a vital role in the design and deployment of intelligent evacuation applications pertaining to crowd control management. While the review deals with video and nonvideo based aspects of crowd monitoring and crowd disaster prediction, evacuation techniques are reviewed via the theme of soft computing, along with a brief review on the evacuation navigation path. We believe that this review will assist researchers in developing reliable automated evacuation systems that will help in ensuring the safety of the evacuees especially during emergency evacuation scenarios

Hydrolink 2011/3. Great East Japan Earthquake

Topic: Great East Japan Earthquak

Modeling Lane-based Traffic Flow In Emergency Situations In The Presence Of Multiple Heterogeneous Flows

In recent years, natural, man-made and technological disasters have been increasing in magnitude and frequency of occurrence. Terrorist attacks have increased after the September 11, 2001. Some authorities suggest that global warming is partly the blame for the increase in frequency of natural disasters, such as the series of hurricanes in the early-2000\u27s. Furthermore, there has been noticeable growth in population within many metropolitan areas not only in the US but also worldwide. These and other facts motivate the need for better emergency evacuation route planning (EERP) approaches in order to minimize the loss of human lives and property. This research considers aspects of evacuation routing never before considered in research and, more importantly, in practice. Previous EERP models only either consider unidirectional evacuee flow from the source of a hazard to destinations of safety or unidirectional emergency first responder flow to the hazard source. However, in real-life emergency situations, these heterogeneous, incompatible flows occur simultaneously over a bi-directional capacitated lane-based travel network, especially in unanticipated emergencies. By incompatible, it is meant that the two different flows cannot occupy a given lane and merge or crossing point in the travel network at the same time. In addition, in large-scale evacuations, travel lane normal flow directions can be reversed dynamically to their contraflow directions depending upon the degree of the emergency. These characteristics provide the basis for this investigation. This research considers the multiple flow EERP problem where the network travel lanes can be reconfigured using contraflow lane reversals. The first flow is vehicular flow of evacuees from the source of a hazard to destinations of safety, and the second flow is the emergency first responders to the hazard source. After presenting a review of the work related to the multiple flow EERP problem, mathematical formulations are proposed for three variations of the EERP problem where the objective for each problem is to identify an evacuation plan (i.e., a flow schedule and network contraflow lane configuration) that minimizes network clearance time. Before the proposed formulations, the evacuation problem that considers only the flow of evacuees out of the network, which is viewed as a maximum flow problem, is formulated as an integer linear program. Then, the first proposed model formulation, which addresses the problem that considers the flow of evacuees under contraflow conditions, is presented. Next, the proposed formulation is expanded to consider the flow of evacuees and responders through the network but under normal flow conditions. Lastly, the two-flow problem of evacuees and responders under contraflow conditions is formulated. Using real-world population and travel network data, the EERP problems are each solved to optimality; however, the time required to solve the problems increases exponentially as the problem grows in size and complexity. Due to the intractable nature of the problems as the size of the network increases, a genetic-based heuristic solution procedure that generates evacuation network configurations of reasonable quality is proposed. The proposed heuristic solution approach generates evacuation plans in the order of minutes, which is desirable in emergency situations and needed to allow for immediate evacuation routing plan dissemination and implementation in the targeted areas

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

Coastal Morphology Assessment and Coastal Protection

Sediment, which collects in rivers and seas to secure a large amount of aggregate, reduces the supply of earth and sand to coasts. Dams and breakwaters constructed in various places also impede the transportation of earth and sand. Furthermore, the maintenance dredging of dam lakes and waterways will also disrupt the supply of sediment to coasts if the dredged sediment is not released back into the water system. Due to these development activities, coastal erosion has become a serious problem in many beaches around the world. Moreover, due to the excessive industrial activities of human beings, the exacerbation of natural disasters caused by global warming is becoming a real problem. In addition, because great earthquakes with a magnitude of 9 or more have occurred about three times per 100 years at boundaries of the Pacific Crust Plate and the Nazca Crust Plate since 1700, the possibility of losing many lives and assets in the Pacific coastal areas due to a huge tsunami caused by a great earthquake should not be underestimated. Therefore, research into the prevention and mitigation of coastal erosion and coastal disasters is becoming increasingly important. This Special Issue, “Coastal Morphology Assessment and Coastal Protection”, consists of five peer-reviewed papers, collected to contribute to the technological progress on the prevention of coastal erosion and coastal disaster resulting from large waves and tsunamis