Avoiding the avoidable: Towards a European heat waves risk governance

The death toll of recent heat waves in developed countries has been remarkably high, contradicting the common assumption that high levels of economic and technological development automatically lead to lower vulnerability to weather extremes. Future climate change may further increase this vulnerability. In this article we examine some recent evidence of heat wave-related mortality and we conclude that while economic wealth and technological capacity might be a necessary condition for adequately coping with adverse climate change effects, they are not sufficient. Questions of awareness, preparedness, organizational issues, and actor networks have to be addressed in a proactive and focused manner in order to avoid future heat wave damages. We propose some practical consequences for heat wave adaptation measures by adopting a risk governance framework that can be universally applied, as it is sufficiently flexible to deal with the multi-level and often fragmented reality of existing coping measures

Avoiding the avoidable: Towards a European heat waves risk governance

The death toll of recent heat waves in developed countries has been remarkably high, contradicting the common assumption that high levels of economic and technological development automatically lead to lower vulnerability to weather extremes. Future climate change may further increase this vulnerability. In this article we examine some recent evidence of heat wave-related mortality and we conclude that while economic wealth and technological capacity might be a necessary condition for adequately coping with adverse climate change effects, they are not sufficient. Questions of awareness, preparedness, organizational issues, and actor networks have to be addressed in a proactive and focused manner in order to avoid future heat wave damages. We propose some practical consequences for heat wave adaptation measures by adopting a risk governance framework that can be universally applied, as it is sufficiently flexible to deal with the multi-level and often fragmented reality of existing coping measures

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

Internet of Things Applications - From Research and Innovation to Market Deployment

The book aims to provide a broad overview of various topics of Internet of Things from the research, innovation and development priorities to enabling technologies, nanoelectronics, cyber physical systems, architecture, interoperability and industrial applications. It is intended to be a standalone book in a series that covers the Internet of Things activities of the IERC – Internet of Things European Research Cluster from technology to international cooperation and the global "state of play".The book builds on the ideas put forward by the European research Cluster on the Internet of Things Strategic Research Agenda and presents global views and state of the art results on the challenges facing the research, development and deployment of IoT at the global level. Internet of Things is creating a revolutionary new paradigm, with opportunities in every industry from Health Care, Pharmaceuticals, Food and Beverage, Agriculture, Computer, Electronics Telecommunications, Automotive, Aeronautics, Transportation Energy and Retail to apply the massive potential of the IoT to achieving real-world solutions. The beneficiaries will include as well semiconductor companies, device and product companies, infrastructure software companies, application software companies, consulting companies, telecommunication and cloud service providers. IoT will create new revenues annually for these stakeholders, and potentially create substantial market share shakeups due to increased technology competition. The IoT will fuel technology innovation by creating the means for machines to communicate many different types of information with one another while contributing in the increased value of information created by the number of interconnections among things and the transformation of the processed information into knowledge shared into the Internet of Everything. The success of IoT depends strongly on enabling technology development, market acceptance and standardization, which provides interoperability, compatibility, reliability, and effective operations on a global scale. The connected devices are part of ecosystems connecting people, processes, data, and things which are communicating in the cloud using the increased storage and computing power and pushing for standardization of communication and metadata. In this context security, privacy, safety, trust have to be address by the product manufacturers through the life cycle of their products from design to the support processes. The IoT developments address the whole IoT spectrum - from devices at the edge to cloud and datacentres on the backend and everything in between, through ecosystems are created by industry, research and application stakeholders that enable real-world use cases to accelerate the Internet of Things and establish open interoperability standards and common architectures for IoT solutions. Enabling technologies such as nanoelectronics, sensors/actuators, cyber-physical systems, intelligent device management, smart gateways, telematics, smart network infrastructure, cloud computing and software technologies will create new products, new services, new interfaces by creating smart environments and smart spaces with applications ranging from Smart Cities, smart transport, buildings, energy, grid, to smart health and life. Technical topics discussed in the book include: • Introduction• Internet of Things Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda• Internet of Things in the industrial context: Time for deployment.• Integration of heterogeneous smart objects, applications and services• Evolution from device to semantic and business interoperability• Software define and virtualization of network resources• Innovation through interoperability and standardisation when everything is connected anytime at anyplace• Dynamic context-aware scalable and trust-based IoT Security, Privacy framework• Federated Cloud service management and the Internet of Things• Internet of Things Application

Modelling the Perinatal Network System

The topic is that hospital capacity for patient beds runs short. We wish to predict when this will occur. An inter-disciplinary approach to this problem is taken incorporating a Management Science / Operational Research perspective. The subject is the Perinatal Network System, which is described, analysed and modelled. An illustrative Case Study is taken of an English local neonatal unit, where new-born babies are cared for. The focus is High dependency cots. Recommendations produced are subject to human factors and implementation difficulties. In this work, Systems Thinking facilitates an understanding of relationships; Enterprise Architecture helps embed the context and address complexity; while Clinical Medicine underpins decision-making for individual patients. Research outputs include the Conceptual Research Framework, a Quality Metric, a Cot Predictor Tool and a Markovian model Design, which can be adapted in the future. Furthermore there is the milieu or connective ‘glue’, to provide unity. The methodology or Enterprise Modelling helps address the issue by facilitating understanding of both overview and detail

Using simulation to investigate impact of different approaches to coordination on a healthcare system’s resilience to disasters

Many disasters that have happened in the last decades have caused a shortage of healthcare resources and change in healthcare activities. Coordination of healthcare facilities is one of the emergency medical response strategies to ensure the continued provision of medical services during disasters. The importance of coordination in healthcare systems during disasters is well recognised in the literature, but to the best of our knowledge there has been no review of the published research in this area. In this thesis, a focused literature review of models for the coordination in the healthcare system is provided. Additionally, measures of coordination effectiveness that denote resilience are discussed. In the field of medical management, there are two types of coordination including integrative care and collaborative care. Both types of coordination aim to improve the emergency medical response by ensuring the continuity of medical services and improving healthcare capability during disasters. Integrative care mainly investigates the resource allocation within a common governance, whereas collaborative care is mainly focused on the sharing of healthcare resources across governances. Thus, integrative care is mainly implemented within a healthcare provider setting, while collaborative care is mainly implemented between the settings. However, resilience is usually perceived at community level rather than at an individual institution when responding to disasters. Improving resilience during disasters requires the capability of different healthcare providers, which can be achieved by collaborative care, rather than integrative care. In addition, the literature has commonly addressed collaborative care using optimisation approach, not simulation approach. In this regard, this study presents simulation models for resilience of the healthcare network during disasters. In collaboration with the health authorities and medical staff in Thailand who experienced a number of disasters we investigated real-world activities that took place in emergency medical responses. We developed novel discrete event simulation models of collaboration in an emergency medical response in a healthcare network during disasters with the aim to improve the resilience of the healthcare network. Three strategies for collaboration in the healthcare network were defined including non-collaborative care, semi-collaborative care, and a new proposed collaborative care. Non-collaborative care strategy was in place in response to Tsunami in Phuket in 2004, while semi-collaborative care strategy is the current strategy which was implemented during the boat capsizing in Phuket in 2018. We propose a new collaborative care strategy which is defined by considering the disadvantages of the current semi-collaborative care strategy. It addresses a new collaboration in the network that enables information sharing and the classification of healthcare providers. The strategies differ with respect to the first treatment provision of patients, sharing of resources, and patient transportation The simulation models were validated and verified by using the boat capsizing real-world event. The model validations were in line with the available system outputs including the number of patients in different categories, resource allocation, patient allocation and average patient waiting times at healthcare providers. A generic metric of resilience proposed in the literature was adapted to be used in healthcare context. Our analysis yielded managerial insights into the emergency planning as follows. In all defined scenarios, the new collaborative care strategy had a considerable impact on improving the resilience and enabled faster return to the pre-disaster state of healthcare network than other strategies. The semi-collaborative care strategy frequently provided the worst resilience in almost all the defined scenarios. However, it provided better resilience than the non-collaborative care strategy when the number of affected patients was relatively small. Even though simulation enabled investigation of the impact of different strategies for collaboration in the network on the resilience, the patient allocation might not be optimal. We developed a mixed integer programming model to address the allocation of patients in collaborative care in which ambulances transport multiple patients to healthcare providers in one trip. The developed model will provide further insights into the collaborative care in disasters management