Trial objectives

This study is an evaluation of hazard-mitigation plans approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) using the requirements of the Disaster Management Act of 2000 (DMA2K).The study investigates whether or not there are significant differences in the mitigation action plans (MAPs) developed by jurisdictions from states with existing planning mandates in their comprehensive plans prior to DMA2K and those without existing planning mandates

We are studying emergency management planning practices in which geographic communities (towns and regions) prepare to respond efficiently to significant emergency events.This work presents a software architecture that facilitates the development of geocollaboration solutions. The architecture extends prior geocollaboration research and reuses existing geospatial information models.This paper describes how the software architecture can be used for the geospatial, emergency management planning activities of one community.

This paper outlines the design and development of a prototype geographical information system centric, social media based dynamic decision support system (GIS-SM-DDSS) that integrates geographical information with Twitter technology to enable selforganized information networks to support decision making and collective actions in emergency situations.

we provide a novel decentralized solution to the coalition formation process that pervades disaster management.we model the emergency management scenario defined in the RoboCup Rescue disaster simulation platform as a coalition formation with spatial and temporal constraints (CFST) problem where agents form coalitions to complete tasks, each with different demands.we formulate it as a distributed constraint optimization problem and show how to solve it using the state-of-the-art Max-Sum algorithm that provides a completely decentralized message-passing solution.We then provide a novel algorithm (F-Max-Sum) that avoids sending redundant messages and efficiently adapts to changes in the environment.In empirical evaluations, our algorithm is shown to generate better solutions than other decentralized algorithms used for this problem.

This article targets a solution by proposing a procedural construction method of interactive map symbols for dynamic disasters and emergency responsesFirst, an emergency response and decision symbol library was classified and integrated into the existing attachments to form a richer symbol library for comprehensively representing disasters and emergencies. Second, an interactive map symbol procedural construction method was designed based on (1) primitive geometric compositions and geometric graphics algorithms to construct the map symbol graphics; (2) an interactive graphics control and drawing attributes configuration method to support user interactive editing of the visual variables of the mapped symbols; (3) and a dynamic updating and drawing strategy to support the real-time refreshing of the changing visual variables.

This paper develops a model for assessing the risks associated with the evacuation process in response to potential chemical accidents, based on which a multi-objective evacuation routing model for toxic cloud releases is proposed taking into account that the travel speed on each arc will be affected by disaster extension.Two heuristic algorithms are proposed to solve the multi-objective evacuation routing model.

tweets are written from the perspective of citizens and the information they provide might be inaccurate, irrelevant or false. Our approach tries to deal with data relevance proposing an innovative ontology-based method for filtering tweets and extracting meaningful topics depending on their semantic content. In this way data become relevant for the operators to make decisions.

This paper proposes a newarchitecture for a training systembased on the interconnection between real and virtual worlds extending the MPEG-V standard; allowing real and virtual units' simultaneous and real-time training using commercial off-the-shelf equipment, and including a novel subsystem for video management from both real and virtual sources.

The Resource-Poor Settings panel developed five key question domains; defining the term resource poor and using the traditional phases of the disaster cycle

This paper presents the results from a project that developed and tested emergency response scenarios for the Birmingham, Alabama USA. region.The main objective of this study is to develop a regional simulation model and use it to evaluate different emergency response procedures.