Emergency Management: A System Dynamics View on the Impact of Disasters in the Corporate Realm

Abstract

Natural or man-made disasters affect organizations quite often. Similar events can be coped with to a certain extent as organizations have safety plans, protocols and emergency procedures. Their development and application are associated with the discipline of emergency management. Its task is to minimize or even eliminate damages or casualties related to the occurrence of hardly predictable catastrophes. The aim of this paper is to present a system dynamics model enabling decision support for managers during all four stages of emergency management, namely mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery.Based on the search in scientific databases and consequent content analysis, causal-loop and stock-and-flow diagrams were developed. The model consists of six modules. While the first one represents the source related to tsunami generation, the remaining five modules deal with objects of interest such as buildings, infrastructure, environment or people. The model represents a simple and still immature example that demonstrates how the system dynamics methodology can be utilized in this domain in practice.