Supporting Group Decision Making and Coordination in Urban Disasters Relief

Abstract

When extreme events affect urban areas the response process should be fast and effective because the population and civil infrastructure densities potentially increase the impact of such events. These situations have shown the need to improve the group decisionmaking process and the coordination of relief activities carried out by relief organizations. This paper proposes to include first responders as decision makers and describes a technological platform to support decision making and coordination activities among these all actors involved. The supporting platform provides digital communication and information recording, representation and dissemination capabilities among the mobile workers participating in the relief efforts. The platform could also be used to support activities in scenarios similar to this one (e.g. police and military operations, massive social events). RÉSUMÉ. Quand des événements extrêmes se produisent dans des zones urbaines, les réponses des services de sécurité et des services d'urgence doivent être rapides et efficaces dans la mesure où la densité de population et d'équipement en augmente l'impact potentiel. Ces situations ont montré l'importance de la prise de décision collective et de la coordination des actions des services de réponse aux désastres. Considérant les personnels des services d'urgence comme des décideurs, nous proposons une architecture d'aide à la décision et à la coordination des activités. Notre plateforme fournit des outils de communication, de collecte des données, de représentation et de dissémination entre les acteurs participants à la réponse. D'autres applications de notre plateforme sont possibles, dans la police ou les armées.This paper presents a proposal to include first responders as decision makers and it describes a technological platform to record, represent and distribute contextual information during disaster relief efforts. The platform intends to improve the decision-making and coordination processes among first responders and the command post. The platform is composed of a software, hardware and communication system. It runs on mobile computing devices and it allows two information representations. Visual representations support the decision-making during disaster relief efforts, and the digital (internal) representation ensures the information's interoperability. The communication support enhances the communication and coordination capabilities of participant organizations. The

Coordinating Loosely-Coupled Work in Construction Inspection Activities

“…These mobile shared workspaces (MSW) seem to be an interesting tool to support mobile workers doing loosely-coupled activities. These systems are strongly being studied because of the impact they could have in productive scenarios; not only in terms of the mobile workers' productivity (Andriessen and Vartiainen 2006;Ochoa et al 2007;Schaffers et al 2006;Wang et al 2005), but also in quality of the mobile work (Andriessen and Vartiainen 2006;Brugnoli et al 2005;Neyem et al 2007;Schaffers et al 2006). Each mobile shared workspace represents a portion of the office (i.e.…”

“…Although using these applications is better than using paper-based information, they do not support instances for collaboration among the actors involved in the inspection process. In addition, these solutions are based on PDAs, therefore they have several usability problems to do hand-written annotations (Guerrero et al 2006;Ochoa et al 2007). In fact, COIN also runs on PDAs, but our usability tests indicated that platform is not appropriate to support construction inspection processes: PDAs are not comfortable enough to input unstructured and intensive data (Guerrero et al 2006).…”

Towards a reference architecture for the design of mobile shared workspaces

“…An Incident Commander is in charge of coordinating the efforts in the field. However this person is typically only able to make the macro-decisions, due to the typical limitations of radio channels [23]. Several decisions are also made in parallel by firemen who need to deal with time-critical situations; e.g., (1) decide where to park a fire truck to get fast and safe access to the building's water network during a fire, or (2) determine which is the best route to rescue a victim.…”

Disseminating shared information in disaster relief efforts: A communication computable model

“…The response process to an extreme event involves a short time period (around to 72 hours) and it is focused mainly on performing search and rescue (SAR) activities [16]. Such period is also known as the "golden relief time".…”