Evaluation of Early Warning Systems

Effectiveness evaluation is a systematic way to improve early warning system and ensure system's effective work. On technical level, early warning system is composed of five procedures, including goal setting, information collection, data analysis, information distribution, and early warning response. This chapter shows how to evaluate these procedures: providing evaluation strategy and indicators. On the viewpoint of administration level, seven evaluation indictors are proposed, including simplicity, flexibility, acceptability, portability, stability, security, and system costs. These indictors make conducting sound and fair valuations practical and help to assess whether a set of evaluative activities are well-designed and working to their potential.