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Emerging technologies provide opportunities for the humanitarian responders’ community to enhance the effectiveness of their response to crisis situations. A part of this development can be contributed to a new type of information supply chains -driven by collaboration with digital, online communities- enabling organizations to make better informed decisions. However, how exactly and to what extend this collaboration impacts the decision making process is unknown. To improve these new information exchanges and the corresponding systems, an evaluation method is needed to assess the performance of these processes and systems. This paper builds on existing evaluation methods for information systems and design principles to propose such an impact evaluation framework. The proposed framework has been applied in a case study to demonstrate its potential to identify areas for further improvement in the (online) collaboration between information suppliers and users.

In urban search and rescue (USAR) situations resources are limited and workload is high. Robots that act as team players instead of tools could help in these situations. A Virtual Reality (VR) experiment was set up to test if team performance of a human-robot team increases when the robot act as such a team player. Three robot settings were tested ranging from the robot as a tool to the robot as a team player. Unexpectedly, team performance seemed to be the best for the tool condition. Two side-effects of increasing robot’s teammembership could explain this result: mental workload increased for the humans who had to work with the team-playing robot, whereas the tendency to share information was reduced between these humans. Future research should, thus, focus on team-memberships that improve communication and reduce cognitive workload.

Disaster exercises are intended to improve disaster responses effectiveness. Exercises exist in a wide variety, ranging from table-top scenarios to full-scale disaster simulations, offering participants different learning experiences. However these exercises can be overwhelming to newcomers, especially when involving large scale simulations, reducing the effectiveness of the learning experience. In order to make the learning experiences more effective to newcomers, researchers or professionals, a new exercise is proposed. This exercise, designed as a serious game, provides a new way to introduce people to the field of disaster management in general and information management in particular. The first version of the game was played during the 2012 ISCRAM summer school where it yielded positive reactions from both novice participants and experienced professionals.

In our modern society, the impact of large-scale safety and security incidents can be large and diverse. Yet, this societal impact is makeable and controllable to a limited extent. At best, the effect of concrete response actions is that the direct damage is somewhat reduced and that the recovery is accelerated. Proper crisis communication can make the biggest difference with respect to overall societal impact. We argue that crisis communication must strike a balance between a directive approach of chaos, command and control and a more empathic approach of continuity, coordination and cooperation. On the basis of a concrete case we analyze how crisis communication reflects the incident response approach and how societal impact is affected.

Modeling the complex decision problems faced in the coordination of disaster response as a scheduling problem to be solved using an optimization algorithm has the potential to deliver efficient and effective support to decision makers. However, much of the utility of such a model lies in its ability to accurately predict the outcome of any proposed solution. The stochastic nature of the disaster response environment can make such prediction difficult. In this paper we examine the effect of unknown disruptions to the road transport network on the utility of a disaster response scheduling model. The effects of several levels of disruption are measured empirically and the potential of using real-time information to revise model parameters, and thereby improve predictive performance, is evaluated.

As a future member of the European Union (EU), Croatia has decided to implement EU Directive 2002/59/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council binding all EU member states to define places of refuge for ships in need of assistance off their coasts, or to develop techniques for providing assistance to such ships. Consequently, the Ministry of the Sea, Tourism, Transport and Development of the Republic of Croatia has initiated a project for developing an effective Decision Support System (DSS) for defining the places of refuge for ships in distress at sea. Such a system would include a model based upon GIS and different operational research models, which would eventually result in establishing an integral DSS. Starting points for analysis are shipping corridors, and 380 potential locations for places of refuge designated in the official navigational pilot book. Multicriteria analysis, with GIS-generated input data, would be used to establish worthiness of a place of refuge for each ship category, taking into account kinds of accident. Tables of available intervention resources would be made, as well as analysis of their availability in respect of response time, and quantitative and qualitative sufficiency.