1 2 3 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Scie... more 1 2 3 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to selfarchive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".
The purpose of this paper is to present reflections on the nature of information management (IM) ... more The purpose of this paper is to present reflections on the nature of information management (IM) and its role and function to support coordination in one of the largest humanitarian crises of our time, the Syria crisis. Starting from general principles for humanitarian information management, we analyze the challenges that information managers face in conflict situations, when information is -more than anywhere else -a source of power and influence. This work outlines the interdependence of advocacy and operational information management, the sensitivity of information, and barriers to information sharing. The results are complex and highly interlaced information and coordination structures that remain unpredictable for many partners. Contrarily, natural disasters -such as Typhoon Haiyan -are dominated by high levels of uncertainty; political interests are less pronounced. An initial comparison is made between the resulting IM challenges for natural and complex disasters.
Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2014
Despite the potential of new technologies and the improvements of early-warning systems since the... more Despite the potential of new technologies and the improvements of early-warning systems since the 2004 Tsunami, damage and harm caused by disasters do not stop to increase. There is a clear need for better integrating the fragmented landscape of researchers and practitioners working on different aspects of decision support for disaster risk reduction and response. To demonstrate and discuss the advantages of integrated systems, we will focus in this paper on vulnerabilities and early-warning systems. While vulnerabilities are mostly used to allocate risk management resources (preparedness), early-warning systems are designed to initiate the response phase. Indicator models have been used as a part of disaster risk reduction frameworks, and in the design of early-warning systems. In this paper we analyse the commonalities and differences between both, and outline how an integrated system that understands vulnerability assessments as part of both risk reduction programs and early-warning shall be designed in future.
Indicator systems of disaster vulnerability are important for monitoring and increasing the capac... more Indicator systems of disaster vulnerability are important for monitoring and increasing the capacity in risk management. Various composite indicators have been developed to operationalize social vulnerability at national and sub-national level. Problems with relations between the sub-indicators of the composite indicator are a common phenomenon. The fuzzy Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method analyzes the structure of complex cause-effect
Economic systems are increasingly prone to complexity and uncertainty. Therefore, making well-inf... more Economic systems are increasingly prone to complexity and uncertainty. Therefore, making well-informed decisions requires risk analysis, control and mitigation. In some areas such as finance, insurance, crisis management and health care, the importance of considering risk is largely acknowledged and well-elaborated, yet rather heterogeneous concepts and approaches for risk management have been developed. The increased frequency and the severe consequences of past supply chain disruptions have resulted in an increasing interest in risk. This development has led to the adoption of the risk concepts, terminologies and methods from related fields. In this paper, existing approaches for quantitative supply chain risk management are reviewed by setting the focus on the definition of supply chain risk and related concepts.
In the event of natural disasters, industrial production sites can be affected by both direct phy... more In the event of natural disasters, industrial production sites can be affected by both direct physical damage and indirect damage. The indirect damage, which often exceeds the direct ones in value, mainly arises from business interruptions resulting from the impairment of information and material flows as well as from domino effects in interlaced supply chains. The importance of industry for society and the domino effects often result in severe economic, social, and environmental consequences of industrial disasters making industrial risk management an important task for risk managers at the administrative level (e.g. civil protection authorities). Since the possible industrial disaster damage depends not only on hazard and exposure but also on the vulnerability of a system, an effective and efficient industrial risk management requires information about the system's regionalized vulnerability. This paper presents a new methodology for structural industrial vulnerability assessment based on production factors that enables to assess the regional industrial disaster vulnerability. In order to capture industryspecific vulnerability factors and to account for the processes underlying regional industrial vulnerability, a two-stage approach is developed. This approach combines a composite indicator model to assess sector-specific vulnerability indices (V s ) with a new regionalization method. The composite indicator model is based on methodologies from the field of multicriteria decision analysis (Mul-tiAttribute Value Theory) and the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory Method is applied to correct the (V s ) for interdependencies among the indicators. Finally, the developed approach is applied to an exemplar case study and the industrial vulnerability of 44 administrative districts in the German federal state of Baden-Wuerttemberg is assessed.
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has changed the way we communi-cate and work. To s... more Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has changed the way we communi-cate and work. To study the effects of ICT for Information Distribution (ID) and Task Assignment (TA) for gaining Teams’ Situational Awareness (TSA) across and within rescue teams, an indoor fire game was played with students. We used two settings (smartphone-enabled support vs. traditional walkietalkies) to analyze the impact of technology on ID and TA for gaining TSA in a simulated Search and Rescue operation. The results presented in this paper combine observations and quantitative data from a survey conducted after the game. The results indicate that the use of the ICT was good in second scenario than first scenario for ID and TA for gaining TSA. This might be explained as technology is more preferable and effective for information sharing, for gaining TSA and also for clear tasks assignment.
Coordination and Information Sharing during Emergency Response (ER) rely on availability, accessi... more Coordination and Information Sharing during Emergency Response (ER) rely on availability, accessibility, and quality of information from various sources. The more reliable information available and accessible, it is possible to make better decisions, and thereby improve the ER operations. Therefore, better ways to make reliable emergency data available and accessible should be developed
2010 International Conference on Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems, 2010
This paper presents a distributed system facilitating robust decision-making under uncertainty in... more This paper presents a distributed system facilitating robust decision-making under uncertainty in complex situations often found in strategic emergency management. The construction of decision-relevant scenarios, each being a consistent, coherent and plausible description of a situation and its future development, is used as a rationale for collecting, organizing, filtering and processing information for decision-making. The construction of scenarios is targeted at assessing decision alternatives avoiding time-consuming processing of irrelevant information.
ABSTRACT Decision-making in emergency management is a challenging task as the consequences of dec... more ABSTRACT Decision-making in emergency management is a challenging task as the consequences of decisions are considerable, the threatened systems are complex and information is often uncertain. This paper presents a distributed system facilitating better-informed decision-making in strategic emergency management. The construction of scenarios provides a rationale for collecting, organising, and processing information. The set of scenarios captures the uncertainty of the situation and its developments. The relevance of scenarios is ensured by gearing the scenario construction to assessing alternatives, thus avoiding time-consuming processing of irrelevant information. The scenarios are constructed in a distributed setting allowing for a flexible adaptation of reasoning (principles and processes) to both the problem at hand and the information available. This approach ensures that each decision can be founded on a coherent set of scenarios. The theoretical framework is demonstrated in a distributed decision support system by orchestrating experts into workflows tailored to each specific decision.
Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is a technique for decision support which aims at providi... more Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is a technique for decision support which aims at providing transparent and coherent support for complex decision situations taking into account subjective preferences of the decision makers. However, MCDA does not foresee an analysis of multiple plausible future developments of a given situation. In contrast, scenario-based reasoning (SBR) is frequently used to assess future developments on the longer term. The ability to discuss multiple plausible future developments provides a rationale for strategic plans and actions. Nevertheless, SBR lacks an in-depth performance evaluation of the considered actions. This paper explores the integration of both techniques that combines their respective strengths as well as their application in environmental crisis management. The proposed methodology is illustrated by an environmental incident example. Future work is to conduct validations on the basis of real-world scenarios by public Dutch and Danish chemical incident crisis management authorities.
Managing the response to natural, man-made and technical disasters becomes increasingly important... more Managing the response to natural, man-made and technical disasters becomes increasingly important in the light of climate change, globalization, urbanization and growing conflicts. Sudden onset disasters are typically characterized by high stakes, time pressure and uncertain, conflicting or lacking information. Since the planning and management of response is a complex task, decision makers of aid organizations can thus benefit from decision support methods and tools. A key task is the joint allocation of rescue units and the scheduling of incidents under different conditions of collaboration. We present an approach to support decision makers, who coordinate response units, by (a) suggesting mathematical formulations of decision models, (b) providing heuristic solution procedures and (c) evaluating the heuristics against both current best practice behavior and optimal solutions. Our computational experiments show that, for the generated problem instances, (1) current best practice behavior can be improved substantially by our heuristics, (2) the gap between heuristic and optimal solutions is very low for instances without collaboration and (3) our heuristics are capable of providing solutions for all generated instances in less than a second on a state-of-the-art PC.
Scenarios are designed to support decision-makers in gaining a better understanding of the conseq... more Scenarios are designed to support decision-makers in gaining a better understanding of the consequences of decisions. Despite their popularity in IT for Foresight, a major obstacle is the complexity of strategic decisions and the resulting multitude of scenarios. Therefore choices need to be made, which scenarios to fully work out, by which experts and in which level of detail. This paper presents an approach to support making these trade-offs between accuracy and resources spent by prioritising scenarios based on their significance for the decision even on the basis of incomplete information. This approach combines theoretical findings in decision theory with results that were elicited in interviews and workshops with decision-makers and experts. In this manner, we ensure to adhere to time and effort constraints of the involved experts, while taking into account the decision-makers' preferences and requirements. The emergency management use-case shows that the resulting reduced set of scenarios leads to the same ranking of decision alternatives as the entire set of scenarios.
2012 IEEE International Multi-Disciplinary Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support, 2012
Decision making under uncertainty is fraught with pitfalls for human thinking: biases prevail. Th... more Decision making under uncertainty is fraught with pitfalls for human thinking: biases prevail. The combination of a scenario-based approach with multi-criteria decision analysis assists in making value judgements, trade-offs and uncertainties explicit. Scenarios, which are constructed in a distributed manner involving multiple experts from different domains, assist in overcoming e.g. the prominence effect and confirmation bias. Furthermore, support is provided
2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2014
Infrastructures (CIs) can have severe consequences for our societies. Therefore, CI resilience ha... more Infrastructures (CIs) can have severe consequences for our societies. Therefore, CI resilience has attracted increasing attention in industries and policy-making. However, empirical studies on CI resilience are rare. In particular, research on the implementation of policies aiming at an improvement of CI resilience is lacking. Using Group Model Building combined with the Delphi method, and surveys we have developed a framework to improve CI resilience. This research identifies policies to enhance CI resilience against major industrial accidents across four dimensions (technical, organizational, economic and social) and proposes a temporal order to ensure that the benefit of policy implementation can be maximized.
ABSTRACT The assessment of the current impacts of extreme weather conditions on transport systems... more ABSTRACT The assessment of the current impacts of extreme weather conditions on transport systems reveals high costs in specific locations. Prominent examples for Europe are the economic consequences of the harsh winter periods 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 and the floods in Austria, Eastern Europe, Germany and the United Kingdom in 2005 and 2007. Departing from the EC-funded project WEATHER, this paper delves into the subject of adaptation strategies by revisiting the project’s general findings on adaptation strategies and by adding two specific cases: (1) advanced winter maintenance on roads in southwest Germany and (2) technical and organizational measures in Alpine rail transport. For these two cases, feasible adaptation strategies are elaborated and their potential is discussed in light of damage cost forecasts up to 2050. For the road sector, we find a high potential to mitigate weather-related costs, although damages here are expected to decline. In contrast, rail systems face strongly increasing damages and the mitigation options offered by improved information and communication systems seem to be largely exploited. Consequently, it is easier to justify expensive adaptation measures for high-cost rail infrastructures than for road transport. A generic analysis of 14 damage cases worldwide, however, revealed that generally awareness raising, cooperation and communication strategies are sufficient to mitigate the most severe damages by natural disasters.
This paper presents a framework of ICT solutions developed in the EU research project DIADEM that... more This paper presents a framework of ICT solutions developed in the EU research project DIADEM that supports environmental management for chemical hazards in industrial areas, with an enhanced capacity to assess population exposure and health risks, alert relevant groups and organize efficient response. The emphasis is on advanced solutions which are economically feasible and maximally exploit the existing communication, computing and sensing resources. This approach supports collaborative information ...
Crises are characterized by complexity, uncertainty and their dynamic evolution. Neither the deve... more Crises are characterized by complexity, uncertainty and their dynamic evolution. Neither the development of the situation nor the consequences of a decision can be foreseen. Therefore, crisis management requires plans and strategies that are designed to account for lacking information and sudden system changes. With the rise of ICT systems, large amounts of data from heterogeneous sources are available to decision-makers that quickly need to be transformed into understandable and reliable information. Hence, the need arises for support in collecting and processing information that can be used for the continuous revision and updating of plans and strategies as an answer to the uncertainty and complexity that they entail. We build on notions from decision theory, emergency and risk management, complexity science and systems theory to conclude that epistemological pluralism and adequate ad-hoc approaches need to be integrated in the design of decision support systems for crisis and emergency management.
1 2 3 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Scie... more 1 2 3 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to selfarchive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".
The purpose of this paper is to present reflections on the nature of information management (IM) ... more The purpose of this paper is to present reflections on the nature of information management (IM) and its role and function to support coordination in one of the largest humanitarian crises of our time, the Syria crisis. Starting from general principles for humanitarian information management, we analyze the challenges that information managers face in conflict situations, when information is -more than anywhere else -a source of power and influence. This work outlines the interdependence of advocacy and operational information management, the sensitivity of information, and barriers to information sharing. The results are complex and highly interlaced information and coordination structures that remain unpredictable for many partners. Contrarily, natural disasters -such as Typhoon Haiyan -are dominated by high levels of uncertainty; political interests are less pronounced. An initial comparison is made between the resulting IM challenges for natural and complex disasters.
Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2014
Despite the potential of new technologies and the improvements of early-warning systems since the... more Despite the potential of new technologies and the improvements of early-warning systems since the 2004 Tsunami, damage and harm caused by disasters do not stop to increase. There is a clear need for better integrating the fragmented landscape of researchers and practitioners working on different aspects of decision support for disaster risk reduction and response. To demonstrate and discuss the advantages of integrated systems, we will focus in this paper on vulnerabilities and early-warning systems. While vulnerabilities are mostly used to allocate risk management resources (preparedness), early-warning systems are designed to initiate the response phase. Indicator models have been used as a part of disaster risk reduction frameworks, and in the design of early-warning systems. In this paper we analyse the commonalities and differences between both, and outline how an integrated system that understands vulnerability assessments as part of both risk reduction programs and early-warning shall be designed in future.
Indicator systems of disaster vulnerability are important for monitoring and increasing the capac... more Indicator systems of disaster vulnerability are important for monitoring and increasing the capacity in risk management. Various composite indicators have been developed to operationalize social vulnerability at national and sub-national level. Problems with relations between the sub-indicators of the composite indicator are a common phenomenon. The fuzzy Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method analyzes the structure of complex cause-effect
Economic systems are increasingly prone to complexity and uncertainty. Therefore, making well-inf... more Economic systems are increasingly prone to complexity and uncertainty. Therefore, making well-informed decisions requires risk analysis, control and mitigation. In some areas such as finance, insurance, crisis management and health care, the importance of considering risk is largely acknowledged and well-elaborated, yet rather heterogeneous concepts and approaches for risk management have been developed. The increased frequency and the severe consequences of past supply chain disruptions have resulted in an increasing interest in risk. This development has led to the adoption of the risk concepts, terminologies and methods from related fields. In this paper, existing approaches for quantitative supply chain risk management are reviewed by setting the focus on the definition of supply chain risk and related concepts.
In the event of natural disasters, industrial production sites can be affected by both direct phy... more In the event of natural disasters, industrial production sites can be affected by both direct physical damage and indirect damage. The indirect damage, which often exceeds the direct ones in value, mainly arises from business interruptions resulting from the impairment of information and material flows as well as from domino effects in interlaced supply chains. The importance of industry for society and the domino effects often result in severe economic, social, and environmental consequences of industrial disasters making industrial risk management an important task for risk managers at the administrative level (e.g. civil protection authorities). Since the possible industrial disaster damage depends not only on hazard and exposure but also on the vulnerability of a system, an effective and efficient industrial risk management requires information about the system's regionalized vulnerability. This paper presents a new methodology for structural industrial vulnerability assessment based on production factors that enables to assess the regional industrial disaster vulnerability. In order to capture industryspecific vulnerability factors and to account for the processes underlying regional industrial vulnerability, a two-stage approach is developed. This approach combines a composite indicator model to assess sector-specific vulnerability indices (V s ) with a new regionalization method. The composite indicator model is based on methodologies from the field of multicriteria decision analysis (Mul-tiAttribute Value Theory) and the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory Method is applied to correct the (V s ) for interdependencies among the indicators. Finally, the developed approach is applied to an exemplar case study and the industrial vulnerability of 44 administrative districts in the German federal state of Baden-Wuerttemberg is assessed.
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has changed the way we communi-cate and work. To s... more Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has changed the way we communi-cate and work. To study the effects of ICT for Information Distribution (ID) and Task Assignment (TA) for gaining Teams’ Situational Awareness (TSA) across and within rescue teams, an indoor fire game was played with students. We used two settings (smartphone-enabled support vs. traditional walkietalkies) to analyze the impact of technology on ID and TA for gaining TSA in a simulated Search and Rescue operation. The results presented in this paper combine observations and quantitative data from a survey conducted after the game. The results indicate that the use of the ICT was good in second scenario than first scenario for ID and TA for gaining TSA. This might be explained as technology is more preferable and effective for information sharing, for gaining TSA and also for clear tasks assignment.
Coordination and Information Sharing during Emergency Response (ER) rely on availability, accessi... more Coordination and Information Sharing during Emergency Response (ER) rely on availability, accessibility, and quality of information from various sources. The more reliable information available and accessible, it is possible to make better decisions, and thereby improve the ER operations. Therefore, better ways to make reliable emergency data available and accessible should be developed
2010 International Conference on Intelligent Networking and Collaborative Systems, 2010
This paper presents a distributed system facilitating robust decision-making under uncertainty in... more This paper presents a distributed system facilitating robust decision-making under uncertainty in complex situations often found in strategic emergency management. The construction of decision-relevant scenarios, each being a consistent, coherent and plausible description of a situation and its future development, is used as a rationale for collecting, organizing, filtering and processing information for decision-making. The construction of scenarios is targeted at assessing decision alternatives avoiding time-consuming processing of irrelevant information.
ABSTRACT Decision-making in emergency management is a challenging task as the consequences of dec... more ABSTRACT Decision-making in emergency management is a challenging task as the consequences of decisions are considerable, the threatened systems are complex and information is often uncertain. This paper presents a distributed system facilitating better-informed decision-making in strategic emergency management. The construction of scenarios provides a rationale for collecting, organising, and processing information. The set of scenarios captures the uncertainty of the situation and its developments. The relevance of scenarios is ensured by gearing the scenario construction to assessing alternatives, thus avoiding time-consuming processing of irrelevant information. The scenarios are constructed in a distributed setting allowing for a flexible adaptation of reasoning (principles and processes) to both the problem at hand and the information available. This approach ensures that each decision can be founded on a coherent set of scenarios. The theoretical framework is demonstrated in a distributed decision support system by orchestrating experts into workflows tailored to each specific decision.
Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is a technique for decision support which aims at providi... more Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is a technique for decision support which aims at providing transparent and coherent support for complex decision situations taking into account subjective preferences of the decision makers. However, MCDA does not foresee an analysis of multiple plausible future developments of a given situation. In contrast, scenario-based reasoning (SBR) is frequently used to assess future developments on the longer term. The ability to discuss multiple plausible future developments provides a rationale for strategic plans and actions. Nevertheless, SBR lacks an in-depth performance evaluation of the considered actions. This paper explores the integration of both techniques that combines their respective strengths as well as their application in environmental crisis management. The proposed methodology is illustrated by an environmental incident example. Future work is to conduct validations on the basis of real-world scenarios by public Dutch and Danish chemical incident crisis management authorities.
Managing the response to natural, man-made and technical disasters becomes increasingly important... more Managing the response to natural, man-made and technical disasters becomes increasingly important in the light of climate change, globalization, urbanization and growing conflicts. Sudden onset disasters are typically characterized by high stakes, time pressure and uncertain, conflicting or lacking information. Since the planning and management of response is a complex task, decision makers of aid organizations can thus benefit from decision support methods and tools. A key task is the joint allocation of rescue units and the scheduling of incidents under different conditions of collaboration. We present an approach to support decision makers, who coordinate response units, by (a) suggesting mathematical formulations of decision models, (b) providing heuristic solution procedures and (c) evaluating the heuristics against both current best practice behavior and optimal solutions. Our computational experiments show that, for the generated problem instances, (1) current best practice behavior can be improved substantially by our heuristics, (2) the gap between heuristic and optimal solutions is very low for instances without collaboration and (3) our heuristics are capable of providing solutions for all generated instances in less than a second on a state-of-the-art PC.
Scenarios are designed to support decision-makers in gaining a better understanding of the conseq... more Scenarios are designed to support decision-makers in gaining a better understanding of the consequences of decisions. Despite their popularity in IT for Foresight, a major obstacle is the complexity of strategic decisions and the resulting multitude of scenarios. Therefore choices need to be made, which scenarios to fully work out, by which experts and in which level of detail. This paper presents an approach to support making these trade-offs between accuracy and resources spent by prioritising scenarios based on their significance for the decision even on the basis of incomplete information. This approach combines theoretical findings in decision theory with results that were elicited in interviews and workshops with decision-makers and experts. In this manner, we ensure to adhere to time and effort constraints of the involved experts, while taking into account the decision-makers' preferences and requirements. The emergency management use-case shows that the resulting reduced set of scenarios leads to the same ranking of decision alternatives as the entire set of scenarios.
2012 IEEE International Multi-Disciplinary Conference on Cognitive Methods in Situation Awareness and Decision Support, 2012
Decision making under uncertainty is fraught with pitfalls for human thinking: biases prevail. Th... more Decision making under uncertainty is fraught with pitfalls for human thinking: biases prevail. The combination of a scenario-based approach with multi-criteria decision analysis assists in making value judgements, trade-offs and uncertainties explicit. Scenarios, which are constructed in a distributed manner involving multiple experts from different domains, assist in overcoming e.g. the prominence effect and confirmation bias. Furthermore, support is provided
2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2014
Infrastructures (CIs) can have severe consequences for our societies. Therefore, CI resilience ha... more Infrastructures (CIs) can have severe consequences for our societies. Therefore, CI resilience has attracted increasing attention in industries and policy-making. However, empirical studies on CI resilience are rare. In particular, research on the implementation of policies aiming at an improvement of CI resilience is lacking. Using Group Model Building combined with the Delphi method, and surveys we have developed a framework to improve CI resilience. This research identifies policies to enhance CI resilience against major industrial accidents across four dimensions (technical, organizational, economic and social) and proposes a temporal order to ensure that the benefit of policy implementation can be maximized.
ABSTRACT The assessment of the current impacts of extreme weather conditions on transport systems... more ABSTRACT The assessment of the current impacts of extreme weather conditions on transport systems reveals high costs in specific locations. Prominent examples for Europe are the economic consequences of the harsh winter periods 2009/2010 and 2010/2011 and the floods in Austria, Eastern Europe, Germany and the United Kingdom in 2005 and 2007. Departing from the EC-funded project WEATHER, this paper delves into the subject of adaptation strategies by revisiting the project’s general findings on adaptation strategies and by adding two specific cases: (1) advanced winter maintenance on roads in southwest Germany and (2) technical and organizational measures in Alpine rail transport. For these two cases, feasible adaptation strategies are elaborated and their potential is discussed in light of damage cost forecasts up to 2050. For the road sector, we find a high potential to mitigate weather-related costs, although damages here are expected to decline. In contrast, rail systems face strongly increasing damages and the mitigation options offered by improved information and communication systems seem to be largely exploited. Consequently, it is easier to justify expensive adaptation measures for high-cost rail infrastructures than for road transport. A generic analysis of 14 damage cases worldwide, however, revealed that generally awareness raising, cooperation and communication strategies are sufficient to mitigate the most severe damages by natural disasters.
This paper presents a framework of ICT solutions developed in the EU research project DIADEM that... more This paper presents a framework of ICT solutions developed in the EU research project DIADEM that supports environmental management for chemical hazards in industrial areas, with an enhanced capacity to assess population exposure and health risks, alert relevant groups and organize efficient response. The emphasis is on advanced solutions which are economically feasible and maximally exploit the existing communication, computing and sensing resources. This approach supports collaborative information ...
Crises are characterized by complexity, uncertainty and their dynamic evolution. Neither the deve... more Crises are characterized by complexity, uncertainty and their dynamic evolution. Neither the development of the situation nor the consequences of a decision can be foreseen. Therefore, crisis management requires plans and strategies that are designed to account for lacking information and sudden system changes. With the rise of ICT systems, large amounts of data from heterogeneous sources are available to decision-makers that quickly need to be transformed into understandable and reliable information. Hence, the need arises for support in collecting and processing information that can be used for the continuous revision and updating of plans and strategies as an answer to the uncertainty and complexity that they entail. We build on notions from decision theory, emergency and risk management, complexity science and systems theory to conclude that epistemological pluralism and adequate ad-hoc approaches need to be integrated in the design of decision support systems for crisis and emergency management.
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Papers by Tina Comes