AYDES: An All-in-One Solution for Geospatial Information Technology Based Disaster Management and Decision Support

The Disaster Management and Decision Support System (AYDES) is a software, data and analysis platform that provide accurate and current disaster and emergency data, reports, statistics, job inspections, queries, analyses etc. at every stages before and after the disaster. AYDES is a holistic platform integrated with many internal and external systems and services, including desktop, mobile and web-based applications that utilize GIS and RS technologies. It has been developed according to the content of the National Disaster Response Plan of Turkey and designed to be easily used by the National Disaster and Emergency Management Agency of Turkey (AFAD), collaborative Ministries, private institutions and provincial organizations. AYDES consists of three core components with their sub components, namely “Incident Command System”, “Spatial Information System” and “Recovery Information System”. Mobile software tools that can deliver real-time information to the web-based core components of AYDES that consists of applications used for mapping during both post-disaster damage detection and pre-disaster risk reduction. Additionally, in case of a need to disaster event inventories, potentially vulnerable assets, hazard—risk data, affected areas of probable or actual disasters, damage detection results and such data and analyses, two software tools have been developed, namely AYDES-RS, a desktop image processing and analysis software and AYDES-CS, a web-based crowdsourcing software tool whereas two of them enable to allow the use of imagery acquired by remote (space/aerial) technologies for various analyses before and after a disaster. In this chapter, we introduce AYDES and related literature survey about similar disaster management platforms and systems in the world.