Information Technology in Disaster Risk Reduction

The present study designed, developed and operated a web portal to support remote island for sightseeing and disaster management. The web portal is developed adopting web-geographic information systems (Web-GIS), and connecting with external Social Networking Services (SNS) and the watch over system. The web portal is operated in Tashirojima Island that is a small island in Ishinomaki City, Miyagi Prefecture in the eastern part of Japan.

The web portal enables to visualize the necessary information concerning sightseeing on the digital maps of Web-GIS. Using Twitter, it is also possible for users to share a variety of information transmitted from an islander in real time. Additionally, using the watch over system, users can usually watch over islanders from the outside of Tashirojima Island. When natural disasters suddenly occur, users can notice the serious situations, and rescue teams to quickly rescue islanders, and support for recovery and reconstruction of Tashirojima Island.

The web portal has been operated since February 22 in 2019, and it has been continuously accessed from the inside and outside of Japan until now. Additionally, users access to the web portal using various types of information terminals. Therefore, the further use of each function can be expected by the continuous operation of the web portal.

In Japan, there are many natural disasters such as river flood and tsunami caused by typhoons, heavy rains and earthquakes. In this case, the residents have an evacuation time to evacuate to shelters after evacuation alerts from a governmental office. The authors reported in a previous paper the development and evaluation of the Regional Information Sharing System (RISS) in order to reduce human damage in natural disasters. But, the actually required and important information to reduce human damage in a regional natural disaster was still unclear. This paper shows an evacuation time-line model and indicates that the actually required and important information in such a case are the location information of Support-required People (SRP) and supporters, and the current shelter’s detail condition. Based on this concept, we newly developed the Real-time Evacuation Support System (RESS), which can share the information on the location of SRP and supporters, and shelter conditions in real time. Further, we present a case study of the prototype system for Kamaishi City in Iwate Prefecture, Japan. We conclude that the developed system will be helpful for local residents to accurately understand the state of the SRP and supporters, and evacuation shelters and reduce the risks of human damage in natural disasters.

To minimize damage during disasters, rapid collection and delivery of accurate information are essential. From this perspective, the use of social media, especially Twitter, in the case of a disaster has attracted worldwide attention. On the other hand, it is known that the number of tweets explodes at the time of a large-scale disaster. For example, at the time of the 2018 northern Osaka earthquake, more than 270,000 tweets containing the word “earthquake” were posted during the 10 min immediately after the quake. Therefore, it is essential to analyze the characteristics of tweets in order to make effective use of Twitter at the time of a disaster. In this study, we develop a system to simultaneously visualize the content of disaster-related tweets as well as the attached images that are related to their textual content. The purpose of constructing the system is to encourage prompt decision-making from local government and rapid evacuation actions by disaster-affected residents in the event of a disaster. From the visualization results using data from tweets posted during Typhoon Hagibis in 2019, it is shown that the proposed system is useful in the event of a disaster. It is also found that good results can be obtained by using datasets consisting of tweets posted during other disasters.

Because of geographical, topographical and meteorological conditions, Japan is subject to frequent natural disasters such as typhoons, torrential rains and heavy snowfalls, as well as earthquakes and tsunami [4]. A team of University of Kochi launched a novel information management system COACHES (Community Oriented Approaches for Comprehensive Healthcare in Emergency Situations), which enables the efficient and quality provision care and relief to the all evacuees [7, 10]. In this paper, we evaluated prototype its web service information sharing among relief workers from the perspective of evacuees through questionnaires and interviews. We found that in order for COACHES to be operational in the field, evacuees need the ability to limit the type of relief workers who can see their information and the types of information they can release.

Since end of 2019, because of the worldwide spread of COVID-19, the whole world has been struggling for solutions to mitigate adverse impacts and worsening situations, which demonstrate very dynamic characteristics requiring high integration among government agencies to make decisions and deliver operation. Within countries around the world, most of disaster management agencies are the primary institutions working with health agencies to cope with health emergencies. To comparing disaster management with public health management, there are lots of common grounds like procedures to deal with emergency and allocations of resources. However, the differences between the two fields offer an opportunity for mutual leaning on best practices of emergency management. For example, in case of disaster event, for better response and control, commanding officials usually dispatch several teams and concentrate resources as much as possible to effectively respond to emergency. According to reports on containing COVID-19 spread, whenever any decisions should consider social distancing first that limits operational space because of safety reason. This paper explores possible collaboration between disaster management with public health management and discusses direction about how to apply information of disaster risk management for public health events. More focal topics concentrate on data processing of population distribution and information integration.

The crisis of humankind, the COVID-19 pandemic, brought the threats but the opportunities toward collaboration on disaster risk reduction (DRR) through public private partnership (PPP) over sustainable development goals (SDGs) at global landscape. Under the direct impact to the social-cultural, political and economic interests, we are in time for change. In the past decade, the concept of PPP has been widely applied to facilitate supply chain resilience after the 2011 the Great East Japan Earthquakes and Tsunami on business continuity planning (BCP). The highlight in 2019 is to implement PPP on climate extremes capacity building programme “Plant Back Better (PBB)” initiatives for Livelihood Continuity Planning (LCP) through the smart technology and climate-smart agriculture across the border for international collaborations. How to look out each other in distance will be the future challenge amidst COVID-19. Consolidating 10 years of implementation findings, this paper developed a cross-border PPP approach on utilizing smart technology for better governance on emergency preparedness and building a stronger partnership engagement on real-time basis. On the digital transformation era, this paper illustrated how we came across the barrier of language, cultural difference and border-control to deliver the DRR mission through PPP amidst the COVID-19 crisis on a common operational picture for emergency preparedness, response and recovery.

The current coordinate system has been the major challenge for the development of earthquake forecasting technology using Single Layer Hierarchical Graph Neuron (SLHGN). First, the accuracy of the longitude value is not distributed equally, and the accuracy gets worse towards the poles. Second, the distance of the same longitude difference varies following the difference of the latitude values. The extreme one is again on the poles, where the longitude value becomes unity. Third, there is no way to have a coordinate of an area. As an alternative the Single Value Coordinate System (SVCS) has been scrutinized and elaborated. The coordinate system treats every area on the earth equally on the equator until the poles. It means that the accuracy is everywhere the same and the calculation of a distance and an area is not dependent on the location (e.g. near the equator, near the North Pole, etc.). At this stage the algorithm for measuring a distance and the conversion from and to the current coordinate system are available. The distance between two locations is directly discovered from the value of the coordinate itself. The coordinate system is fundamentally dedicated to pinpoint an area, not a point. The smaller an area is the more precise the location will be. Using the SVCS, the characteristic of the earth as a spherical shape suits the SLHGN architecture.

This interpretative case study investigates social media use during three urban floods in Bandung City, Indonesia. The results suggest that social media is widely used by citizens as an alternative means of emergency communication. As for the government, although the implementation of social media in Bandung City Government can be said to be a pioneer in comparison to other city governments, and Bandung governments units were required to implement social media, social media played a very limited role in crisis communication between citizens and government. Reasons for this include fragility in adoption of technology, lack of institutionalization of technology, and a mutual distrust between government and citizens, where citizens prefer to use traditional media to issue complaints and report status updates rather than government agencies. This empirical finding was found based on a multimethod study, using interview data, social media scraping, document analysis and field study as sources of data.

Across the Indonesia Archipelago, children are affected by multiple disasters such as floods, earthquake, tsunami, forest fires and now exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Children and schools should be protected from disasters. During 1967–2020, 37,430 schools are damaged due to natural disasters in Indonesia. Since, March 16, 2020 virtually days without going to school. This research aims to unfold the convergence of Children Centred Approach and Multi Hazard Early Warning Systems in Indonesia as an effort to build resilience. This research is a case study of the mobile application called BUMIKITA which is translated to OUR WORLD by Save the Children in Indonesia. The location of the research is at the provincial level in Jakarta, West Java, Bali, and West Nusa Tenggara. The mobile app is potential to be developed into a Children Centred Multi Hazard Early Warning System. Currently there is still a few numbers of downloads with about 1000 users within a couple of months. Aggressive promotions are needed with an opportunity to collaborate with government agencies such as the Ministry of Education and Disaster Management Agencies to proliferate the mobile app to be utilized by parents, teachers, and children.

The first part of this article first distinguishes “restricted knowledge representation (KR) and sharing (KS)” and the still seldom researched task of “general KR and KS”. This parts then highlights the usefulness of the latter for disaster management, and provides a panorama of complementary techniques supporting it. The research question that these techniques collectively answer is: how to let Web users collaboratively build KBs (KR bases) i) that are not implicitly “partially redundant or inconsistent” internally or with each other, ii) that are complete with respect to certain criteria or subjects, iii) without restricting what the users can enter nor forcing them to agree on terminology or beliefs, and iv) without requiring people to duplicate knowledge in various KBs, or manually search knowledge in various KBs and aggregate knowledge from various KBs? In a second part, this article shows the way various kinds of disaster management related information can be categorized or represented for general KS purposes, e.g. terminologies and information objects (these objects are rarely represented via KRs; examples about Search & Rescue procedures are given).

Specialists now make the most of information and communication technologies at all stages of disaster risk management. These technologies, along with the ever-increasing number of Internet of Things devices, can assist in disaster risk reduction or emergency response decisions. At the same time, the existing Cyber-Physical Systems of natural disaster risk management are based on mathematical methods. But mathematical (quantitative) methods have a number of drawbacks, therefore, expert (qualitative) assessments are the only means of solving many control problems due to the ease of use for predicting almost any situation, including in conditions of incomplete information. Research aimed at developing a general methodology for managing disaster response shows that it is possible to view response management as a process and production management problem. Based on this view, process and production management system technology can be used to develop a common framework for a disaster risk management system. A model of situational management of such systems based on qualitative methods is proposed. The model will allow the creation of automatic cyber-physical systems for disaster risk management. At the same time, the proposed model is devoid of the shortcomings of mathematical models and is close to the human way of expressing knowledge.

The paper formulates the problem of forming a list of recovery measures to restore elements of the region’s infrastructure from the consequences of natural disasters by automating the identification of problem areas and places that require repair. It is proposed to process information from unmanned aerial vehicles or high-resolution satellite images, using specially trained neural networks, to check the transport infrastructure and the integrity of power lines. Checking the integrity of the transport infrastructure is necessary to ensure that the repair crew can approach the place of rupture or breakdown. If there is no way to get to the repair site, the repair team should be reassigned to another location to keep downtime to a minimum. A neural network has been built and trained, which allows to determine the places of the rubble, fix their coordinates and plot on the map, as well as send the operator photographs of the areas that have raised doubts to correct the information. The neural network allows to determine the location of breaks in power lines and the integrity of the towers. A strategy for compiling a list of repairs is described, which takes into account the places of necessary repairs, access to them, repair time, travel time, time to eliminate congestion and the number of teams available. The results of computational experiments are analyzed.

Main purpose of current research is to present evolutions in previous presented approaches of the author for manipulating social media content for disaster management of natural events. Those innovations suggest the adoption of machine learning for classifying both photos and text posted in social networks along with hybrid geo-referencing. As case study the author chose the Ianos cyclone, occurred between Italy and Greece, during September 2020. The geographic focus of the research was in Greece where the cyclone caused 4 human losses and damages in the urban environment. A dataset consisted of 4655 photos, with their corresponding captions, timestamps and location information was crawled from Instagram. The main hashtag used was #Ianos. Two data samples, one for each type, were classified manually for calibrating the classification models. The classes regarding photos were initially: (i) related and (ii) not related to Ianos, while the general classification schema for photos and text was: (i) Ianos event identification, (ii) consequences, scaled according to the impact of each report, (iii) precaution, (iv) disaster management: announcements, measures, volunteered actions. Author’s approach regarding classification suggests the use of convolutional neural networks and support vector machine algorithms for image and text classification respectively. The classified dataset, was geo-referenced by using commercial geocoding API and list-based geoparsing. The results of the research in current status are at an initial level, a subset of data though of automatically or manually processed information is presented in four related maps.

The Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE) are initiating a digitalization process that involves the use of a digital metering value chain and cloud computing. The main objective of this study is to investigate how NVE can ensure cyber-security in digital meters and the cloubased metering value chain for mountain landslide warning. The study is based on a qualitative approach including methods like document analysis and semi structured interviews used as input to a risk analysis based on the ISO 31000 standard. The risk analysis covered three different scenarios from NVE. Those three scenarios were internal, external Norwegian, and transnational value chains for metering landslide warning. The results of the risk analysis showed that the largest risk was loss of metering data caused by failures in complex digital value chains combined with the risk of human error. We concluded that the risk is significantly higher for the transnational digital value chains, and that the recommended risk mitigation is a combination of organizational and technical countermeasures.

The aim of this paper is to examine emergency employees’ perception of the possibilities and challenges of the implementation of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in their daily processes. Therefore, interviews with eight emergency services employees from differing organizational and positional backgrounds were conducted over the course of two separate research projects. These semi-structured personal and group interviews were subsequently transcribed, and analysed using Grounded Theory. The authors come to the conclusion, that changing perspectives on technology in emergency processes could help enable better cooperation between emergency employees and technology. The raising of employee awareness, and the provision of sufficient training, is vital to both further the understanding of technology as non-human actor and to focus on their interconnectedness. This enhanced interaction between human emergency employees and non-human technological systems could lead to the improved exploitation of socio-technical opportunities to increase the overall security of our society. This research paper seeks to draw out lessons for ICT-implementation within emergency services by examining the opinions and perspectives of employees from different emergency organizations. In so far, the findings and recommendations of the article will support efforts made by emergency organizations to integrate Information and Communication Technologies into their existing processes.

The digital transformation of society in recent years has led to a qualitatively new leap in the development of natural sciences. Currently, these new technologies allow the collection and processing of a huge amount of information and increase the growth of scientific production, parallel to fusing the boundaries between scientific disciplines. Hence, the created Earth observation centers are a natural prerequisite for facilitating these processes. This article presents our studies on the information system architecture of some of the leading Earth observation research centers, with a focus on capabilities for integration with other scientific infrastructures. We review an original solution based on hybrid service-microservice architecture being implemented in the National Geoinformation Center of Bulgaria, investigating some possible advantages it may provide for integration with other Earth observation centers.

A number of research and innovation projects aim to develop and demonstrate the benefits of novel solutions, in the particular case analysed in this paper – in the field of disaster or crisis management. The focus of the assessment of these solutions is on the benefits they bring by increasing the effectiveness and/or the performance of crisis management actors in a controlled environment. As a rule, little attention is given to safety and security considerations related to their intended use beyond trials and demonstrations, in an actual crisis management context. To speed up market uptake and innovation, this paper presents a technology-based classification of existing and potential solutions and a structure of their possible impact on safety and security. On that basis the authors identify pertinent ‘technology-impact’ combinations, list some relevant norms and standards for each such combination, and provide the outlines of three illustrative test cases. The paper concludes by a discussion on the implementation of the presented approach.

In the given work the analysis of features of mathematical model of management of integral fire risk is carried out, and also grouping of administrative-territorial units of Ukraine on level of integral fire risk by means of the cluster analysis is carried out. As a result of the analysis, all regions of Ukraine were divided into 4 groups. This will allow to apply an appropriate model of integral fire risk management for each group. Further research will be aimed at developing a method of integral fire risk management, which is expected to be applied to each group of regions.

One of the forms of protecting the population from emergencies is the controlled evacuation of people from buildings for the required time, calculated on the basis of their design and planning decisions. For this purpose, scientifically sound plans for evacuation of people are developed, the main component of which are the programs of modeling of human flows, which adequately reflect the real processes of movement of people. In this work, it is proposed to take into account the natural deformation of the human body by rotating parts of its body (eg, the shoulder) when modeling flow motion. For this purpose, it is proposed to present the projection of a human body of a set of three ellipses: the main with the possibility of its rotation in the framework of maneuverability with respect to the basic direction of movement, and two ellipses, given by the half-axis’s, which are equal to half the length and thickness of the shoulder with the possibility of their rotation. in a given range of angles in the horizontal plane relative to the raised arm of the person. Such a problem arises with the active movement of people in the flow of high density, when the category of movement changes from free to compressed. The paper formalizes the constraints, builds a mathematical model of the active movement of people in the flow, provides examples of computer simulation of the movement of people, which represented by a three-component models.

With the current high risks of cyber incidents either caused by malicious cyber criminals or by accidents, there is a latent need for cyber resilience. This discipline is a broader than the traditional cybersecurity concept as it aims to give companies an adaptability such that they are “safe-to-fail”, i.e. that companies are capable of facing cyber incidents and still continue their operations or recover quickly. Although cyber resilience is a desirable capability in companies it is not easy to operationalize because it requires knowledge, experience, strategic planning and decision-making capabilities. These characteristics are not easily found in companies starting their cyber resilience building process such as SMEs. Moreover, the current literature offers documents to aid in the operationalization of cyber resilience by giving companies several actions or policies that build cyber resilience, but the information on how to strategize an effective cyber resilience building process is often scarce. Therefore, this article proposes a strategic planning and self-assessment tool to aid companies in the strategic planning of cyber resilience building. This tool contains the most important cyber resilience policies for SMEs and natural progressions for them obtained from the experience of 11 experts. With these progressions companies can obtain insights on what is their current state in each policy and what actions they can perform in order to improve that state. Thus, the tool can be helpful to develop effective action plans for cyber resilience building.

The pressure on the sanitary system caused by the Covid-19 pandemics put in risk many lives. The unknowns of the pandemic behavior caused problems for a more accurate prediction of the demands for hospitalization and ICU. As a result, two situations were observed: unnecessary expansion of the sanitary system with campaign hospitals and, worse, the saturation of the system with or without expansion. This article proposes the use of a backwards approach to compare the data predicted by a SD model with the real data obtained from the hospitals in the Basque Country. The goal was to calibrate the model to be better prepared for the eventual new wave of infections reducing the risk of collapse or unnecessary response actions to the emergency.

Emergency situations require quick responses from both experts and those who need support in risk situations. People’s perception of emergency situations and its solutions has become an important element of academic and practical research. In this context, the lack of real-time responses can affect sensitive environments and emergency scenarios causing irreparable damage. Thus, this research aims to support specialists involved in emergency response, providing them tools and resources to support their decision-making process. The work proposes a collaborative solution supported by a web application and drones. This solution aims to collect information in a collaborative way of the emergency situation, through the specialists’ awareness during a real emergency action. In addition, the results of the research streamline the capture of information, in less time, aiming to minimize the loss of knowledge of specialists. This information made available in an easy way allows the response team to have greater security for actions, generating greater support for decision making, thus speeding up emergency care. This work was evaluated by specialized Firefighters, who already work with drones in actual emergency situations, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Drought is a common climate phenomenon for the territory of Bulgaria, which has a negative impact on agriculture and water resources. Taking into account the undetermined character of drought in regard to drought occurrence, severity and impact the present study proposes a fuzzy logic approach to complex drought vulnerability assessment. The assessment is based on multifactorial analysis integrating climatic (precipitation and air temperature) and non-climatic (distance from the water objects, aspects and soil types) factors for drought occurrence as well as anthropogenic factors (land use types) in order to determine drought susceptibility and vulnerability. In this study, the fuzzy logic model is designed as a three-level hierarchical system with four inputs and one output. Each level of the hierarchical system is consisted of one fuzzy logical subsystem with two inputs. The results of the simulations performed with developed fuzzy logic system using actual data show the importance of climatic factors for drought susceptibility while drought vulnerability depends mainly of anthropogenic factors. The areas with the same susceptibility to drought may have different degrees of vulnerability depending on the type of land use and the number of people affected. The fuzzy logic model is useful for a comprehensive drought assessment, especially for areas for which available data are insufficient.