Police, fire, and emergency personnel rely on wireless networks to serve the public. Whether it is during a natural disaster, or just an ordinary calendar day, wireless nodes of varying types form... Show More

Police, fire, and emergency personnel rely on wireless networks to serve the public. Whether it is during a natural disaster, or just an ordinary calendar day, wireless nodes of varying types form the infrastructure that local, regional, and even national scale agencies use to communicate while keeping the population served safe and secure. In this article, Michael R. Bartolacci and Stanko Dimitrov present a network interdiction modeling approach that can be utilized for analyzing vulnerabilities in public service wireless networks; subject to hacking, terrorism, or destruction from natural disasters. They develop a case study for wireless networks utilized by the sheriff's department of Miami-Dade County in Florida in the United States. Finally, the authors' modeling approach—given theoretical budgets for the “hardening” of wireless network nodes and for would-be destroyers of such nodes—highlights parts of the network where further investment may prevent damage and loss of capacity.

Existing literature argues that taking a holistic approach to disaster management is important for organizations in building resilience. Theoretical underpinnings to achieve a holistic... Show More

Existing literature argues that taking a holistic approach to disaster management is important for organizations in building resilience. Theoretical underpinnings to achieve a holistic understanding, however, is lacking. This article applies the notion of an ecosystem as a holistic lens to understand complex disaster management. The paper reports two case studies from Japan and Nepal to illustrate how an ecosystem works during a disaster. The theoretical framework of information ecology is used in analyzing the cases. Based on the findings, the study shows three interconnected mechanisms that can build resilience of an ecosystem in a disaster management context, namely (1) coevolution, (2) collaboration, and (3) embeddedness of local knowledge. The authors argue that coevolution is a key to respond to constantly changing situations during a disaster. To accomplish ecosystem coevolution, creating a collaboration system with governments and local communities and embedding local knowledge into the system are essential. Furthermore, digital tools can play a critical role in the coevolution process.

Each summer in Australia, bushfires burn many hectares of forest, causing deaths, injuries, and destroying property. Agent-based simulation is a powerful tool to test various management strategies... Show More

Each summer in Australia, bushfires burn many hectares of forest, causing deaths, injuries, and destroying property. Agent-based simulation is a powerful tool to test various management strategies on a simulated population, and to raise awareness of the actual population behaviour. But valid results depend on realistic underlying models. This article describes two simulations of the Australian population's behaviour during bushfires designed in previous work, one based on a finite-state machine architecture, the other based on a belief-desire-intention agent architecture. It then proposes several contributions towards more realistic agent-based models of human behaviour: a methodology and tool for easily designing BDI models; a number of objective and subjective criteria for comparing agent-based models; a comparison of our two models along these criteria, showing that BDI provides better explanability and understandability of behaviour, makes models easier to extend, and is therefore best adapted; and a discussion of possible extensions of BDI models to further improve their realism.

Resource allocation is one of the most important tasks in organizing humanitarian response to humanitarian crises. It is not only that adequate and efficient resource allocation save lives and... Show More

Resource allocation is one of the most important tasks in organizing humanitarian response to humanitarian crises. It is not only that adequate and efficient resource allocation save lives and reduce damages caused by humanitarian crises, but resource allocation must be fast and efficient to save time and resources. Given that resource allocation is a type of a decision-making process, it is expected that decision on resource allocation are based on accurate and relevant information generated at various stages of humanitarian response. In this article, the authors promote Semantic Resource Allocation tools which a) collects and interprets the semantics of an environment where resource allocation is required and b) the reasons upon the semantics of that environment in order to make appropriate resource allocation. The tool is built with computations based on SWRL enabled OWL ontologies. The prototype has been implemented as a desktop application which can also run in mobile/wireless environments, including Android smart phones.