PREdictive model for DISaster response configuration (PREDIS decision platform)

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonThe extraordinary conditions of a disaster, require the mobilisation of all available resources, inducing the rush of humanitarian partners into the affected area. This phenomenon called the proliferation of actors, causes serious problems during the disaster response phase including the oversupply, duplicated efforts, lack of planning. The aim of this research is to provide a solution to reduce the partner proliferation problem. To that end the main research question is put forward as “How to reduce the proliferation of partners in a disaster response”? Panel analysis of the historic record of 4,252 natural onset disasters between 1980 to 2013 via regression analysis, MA and AHP gives rise to the formation of a predictive decision-making platform called PREDIS. It is capable of predicting the human impact of the disaster (fatality, injured, homeless) of up to 3% of errors and enables the decision makers to estimate the required needs for each disaster and prioritises them based on the disaster type and socio-economics of the affected country. It further renders it possible to rank and optimise the desired partners based on the decision maker’s preferences. Verification of the PREDIS through a simulation game design using a sample group of decision makers, show that this technique enables the user to decide within one hour after the disaster strike using the widely available data at the time of the disaster. It also enables non-experts to decide almost identically to experts in terms of the similarity of the choices and the speed of the decision.The lack of an extensive database for the potential humanitarian partners from which to choose, is the limitation of this research in addition to the lack of standardised set of minimum requirements for the suitable partners.The model is also as strong as its data feed which is inconsistent in various humanitarian sources

Towards a Performance Measurement System to Control Disaster Response

International audienceDuring a crisis, the main goal for decision-makers consists in restoring a stabilized nominal mode. The stakeholders have to face an important pressure and drastic constraints of response time and coordination. This study proposes a method assisting these stakeholders in their choices while carrying out a performance evaluation of the activities run during the crisis response process. Currently, in crises, the performance evaluation is only used subsequently due to difficulties in gathering and aggregating information into trustable performance indicators. The interest of this paper is to present this method which permits to obtain a relevant decision support system. Decision-makers will use it to resolve the crisis based on performance assessment. A case study about crisis management within the French Red Cross non-governmental organization is developed in order to explain how performance indicators can on the one hand support crisis response management and on the other hand improve the collaboration of stakeholders