Design considerations for a virtual information center for humanitarian assistance/disaster relief using workflow modeling

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Abstract

There are innumerable human and organizational circumstances when free flowing information is essential for effective decision-making. In a closed system with limited boundary scanning, information handling is a fairly manageable task [School Library Journal, 39 (1993) 146]. However, where sources of data and/or decisions are high volume encompass a large geographic area and cover a gamut of organizational entities, information gathering and fusing can be daunting [FEMA, Publication No. 229 (4) (1995)]. This paper analyzes the workflow typical in a disaster scenario and discusses the design considerations for a virtual information center (VIC) that can both efficiently and effectively coordinate and process a large number of information requests for disaster preparation/management/recovery teams. The proposed design is domain independent, uses a net-centric approach and can be readily exported to many other governmental and organizational decision environments. The prototype version of the system uses the object-oriented model in connecting to multiple databases across the Internet and has all the essential features that can readily be cloned to enlarge the system's scope.

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.

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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.

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