Design considerations for a virtual information center for humanitarian assistance/disaster relief using workflow modeling
Section snippets
An example scenario
A quiet Friday on a July afternoon was slowly settling towards what was promising to be a sunny three-day weekend over San Francisco Bay. The city was gearing for the annual Independence Day celebrations coming up on the following Monday. In his office at the CalTech Seismic Lab in Pasadena, John continued to monitor the earthquake measuring instruments with concentration. The seismograph had never been quiet but that was normal for the region. The city had been warned of the ‘big one’ for
Toward a global VIC
Given the cosmic design or lack of design of the universe and the inevitability of human errors, disasters are a distinct reality of everyday life. Disasters—both natural and man-made—can strike anytime and anyplace. Perrow [12] advocated that disasters are non-preventable and even argued they can be considered a ‘normal’ occurrence. Some organizations tend to believe disasters do happen but that they only happen to other people [1]. Experience shows that today for their very survival both
Organizational view
Typically, the VIC staff consists of a director, senior analysts and researchers. A system administrator and librarians assist in the continuity of operations at each center. The overall architecture of the VIC is shown in Fig. 2. It is envisioned that there will be several VICs each focusing on a specific type of disaster such as earthquake, floods, war/aggression. To coordinate the activities at the VICs, we propose the creation of an entity called Crisis Response Center (CRC). As the center
Workflow analysis
At its most basic level, workflow is the automation of a business process. It consists in managing the flow of information that runs across the multiple entities involved in a specific business process. Workflow applications decompose a business process into a number of steps called tasks. In addition to speeding up execution of tasks wherever possible in parallel, understanding of workflow also enables tracking the status of tasks in progress. Earlier studies have shown workflow analysis to be
Implementation model for VIC
The prototype implementation of the VIC adapts many of the features of the object-oriented model. The objects, their properties and their relationships used in the system are shown in Fig. 6. In addition, the objects have encapsulated methods that can be transparently invoked when the appropriate events occur during the processing. Table 1 shows an example method packaged in the RFI object.
Objects and methods interact with other objects through the programs. When program statements are
Lessons learned
Initial experience with the VIC framework and simulations show promise for the overall approach proposed in this study in developing Web-centric disaster management systems. Most of the expectations in terms of information accuracy, response time, and value were met, further confirming the feasibility of the concept. The object-oriented design coupled with the workflow modeling was a powerful combination in exploiting the new trends in the Internet and programming technologies. The utmost
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Dr Michael Sovereign, from the Naval Postgraduate School, and USN Captain (Retired) Carl Schuster, for their inspirational work on humanitarian assistance/disaster relief and to Sunwon Cho and Joao Lourenco, both graduate students at the University of Hawaii, for their inputs on the design of the VIC workflow and its database structure.
Tung Bui is Matson Navigation Company Professor at the College of Business Administration, University of Hawaii, Manoa. Dr Bui holds a doctorate in managerial economics from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and a PhD in information systems from New York University. He has done extensive work in effective implementation of information technology in organizations.
References (16)
- et al.
Supporting cognitive feedback using systems dynamics: a demand model of the global systems of mobile telecommunication
Decision Support Systems
(1996) - et al.
Building online crisis management support using workflow systems
Decision Support Systems
(1999) Global Disasters
(1993)- T. Bui, J. Lourenco, Evaluation of the Current VIC Resource Center Workflow Process, Technical Report, University of...
- et al.
A framework for designing a global information network for multinational humanitarian assistance/disaster relief
Information Systems Frontiers
(2000) - et al.
When disaster strikes
School Library Journal
(1993) Taking a comprehensive approach to handling disasters
American City and County
(1997)Dealing with disasters
School Planning and Management
(1996)
Cited by (36)
Toward a campus crisis management system amid the pandemic and beyond
2023, Information and ManagementOn current crowd management practices and the need for increased situation awareness, prediction, and intervention
2017, Safety ScienceCitation Excerpt :While synthesizing and recognizing crowd behavior has been addressed in the literature, less attention has been dedicated to how such data can help crowd managers make effective decisions in the control room, for example, during an event. Existing works either tend to focus on managing disasters and emergencies (Bui and Sankaran, 2001; Perry, 2003; Lorincz et al., 2004; Reddy et al., 2009; Asimakopoulou and Bessis, 2011; Illiyas et al., 2013), or on very specific cases such as air traffic control (Bentley et al., 1992; Mackay et al., 1998) and underground stations (Suchman, 1997; Luff and Heath, 2000), overlooking how technology can be used to support decisions before accidents happen during an event, or to support planning and debriefs. Theories on socio-technical systems recommend new systems to be designed and operated with a holistic approach that optimizes both technical and social factors (Cherns, 1976, 1987; Clegg, 2000; Clegg and Shepherd, 2007).
The role of centrality in ambulance dispatching
2012, Decision Support SystemsCitation Excerpt :The dispatching policy, upon the right selection of the parameters within the policy, can significantly reduce the average as well as the variation of response time, as a result of being equipped with global exploration capability driven by the centrality consideration that is lacking in other local policies. This work is aligned with recent endeavors that try to apply information technology and decision support systems in disaster management [7,16,17,22,25]. During emergencies, decision making is a challenging task that requires immediate and effective action despite the pressures of incomplete and erroneous information.
Survey of data management and analysis in disaster situations
2010, Journal of Systems and SoftwareCitation Excerpt :Most probably such systems perform simple IF based on string matching. Bui and Sankaran (2001) analyzes the workflow typical in a disaster scenario and discusses the design considerations for a virtual information center that can both efficiently and effectively coordinate and process a large number of information requests for disaster preparation, management and recovery teams. According to this paper, workflows can be categorized depending on their organizational function and complexity level.
EXTENDING TASK-TECHNOLOGY FIT WITH DUAL INFORMATION PROCESSING MODES IN DISASTER DECISION SUPPORT
2024, Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic CommerceManagement of humanitarian relief operations using satellite big data analytics: the case of Kerala floods
2022, Annals of Operations Research
Tung Bui is Matson Navigation Company Professor at the College of Business Administration, University of Hawaii, Manoa. Dr Bui holds a doctorate in managerial economics from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and a PhD in information systems from New York University. He has done extensive work in effective implementation of information technology in organizations.
Siva Sankaran is professor of Management Information Systems at the California State University at Northridge. Earlier, he taught at the Naval Postgraduate school in Monterey, CA. He holds a PhD in information systems from New York University. His research interests include Web-based education, entrepreneurship and telemedicine.