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CNTA ’09 Université A.MIRA BEJAIA
Information Technology for Enhancing DisasterManagement
Nadia Nouali, Nadir Bouchama, Ahcène Bendjoudi, Abdelaziz Babakhouya, Said Yahiaoui, Yacine Belhoul, HoudaZeghilet, and Nabil Guellati
Division de Recherche Théorie et Ingénierie des Systèmes Informatiques (DRTISI)Centre de Recherche sur l’Information Scientifique et Technique (CERIST)03 Rue des frères Aissou, Ben Aknoun, Alger, Algérie{nnouali, nbouchama, abendjoudi, babakhouya, syahiaoui, ybelhoul, hzeghilet, nguellati}@cerist.dz
 Abstract
— Responding to natural or man-made disasters, in atimely and effective manner, can reduce deaths and injuries aswell as economic losses. Predicated on the assumption thatbetter information leads to efficient decision-making and moreeffective performance of crisis response, research projectsapplying advanced information technology solutions to thecrisis management field have emerged. This paper provides anoverview of most recent projects, in this area, all over theworld. Furthermore, the study highlights that using scalableand robust IT solutions can drastically facilitate access to theright information, by the right individuals and organizations,at the right time.
 Keywords:
Disaster management systems, Informationtechnology, Wireless communications, Informationmanagement.
I.
 
I
NTRODUCTION
 A disaster is a tragedy that negatively affects society orenvironment. It may be natural (tornadoes, hurricanes,tsunamis, floods, earthquakes, etc.) or human-made (riots,terrorist attacks, war, etc.). The most striking examples of recent disasters are the tsunami that struck Thailand onDecember 2004 and the September 11 World Trade Centerattacks. Disasters result in loss of life and property, anddisrupt economic activity, besides causing immense miseryto the affected population. All existing infrastructures aresuspected to be destroyed by the disaster, includingcommunication infrastructures. Thus, interventions ondisaster areas are obviously made difficult.A considerable growth has been observed during the lastfew decades in the number of disasters. Fig. 1 shows thenumber of disasters that occurred during the last twentyyears in the entire world. These statistics are made by theWHO
1
Collaborating Centre for Research on theEpidemiology of Disasters (CRED) [16]. According to thestatistics collected by the CRED, Algeria is classed ninthamong the most affected countries in 2007. In the last fiftyyears our country was struck by about 10 disasters of severe
1
World Health Organizationconsequences. A large destruction of buildings andinfrastructures was caused by earthquakes and a largenumber of victims were observed (varying from 60 to 3000).Disaster management is the discipline of developingstrategies for reducing the impact of disasters and for givingassistance to the affected population. Disaster managementencompasses mitigation, preparedness, response, andrecovery efforts undertaken to reduce disasters impact [13].Mitigation is the efforts to reduce the physical and socialimpact of future disasters. It includes building structures thatresist the physical forces of disaster impacts and efforts todecrease the exposure of human populations to dangeroussituations. Preparedness includes development, deployment,and testing of disaster management systems. Response is thedirect intervention in the disaster area for the immediateprotection of life and property and minimizing the effects of the disaster. Finally, recovery is the process and activitiesintended to ensure operation continuation of vital systems.Recently, the use of IT in disaster management hasemerged in several research and development projects (useof databases, GIS, wireless and mobile technologies, etc.).The survey presented in this paper is motivated by theinitiation of a disaster management project by our researchteam and it is a step of the first phase of our project whichgoal is to observe actual events, learn lessons from theresponders and domain experts as well as existing literature.Fig. 1. Number of disasters in the world since 1988
 
CNTA ’09 Université A.MIRA BEJAIAThe paper is organized as follows: in section 2, we givean overview of disaster management projects using IT, whilea brief discussion is presented in section 3. In Section 4, weintroduce the CERIST’s project on disaster management.Finally, section 5 concludes the paper.II.
 
O
VERVIEW OF
D
ISASTER
M
ANAGEMENT
P
ROJECTS
 In this section, we present six projects concerned withdisaster management, namely: DUMBO, WISECOM,RESCUE, InfoWare, Sahana, and DDT.
 A.
 
 DUMBO project 
DUMBO [6][7][10] (Digital Ubiquitous Mobile Broad-band OLSR) is an emergency network platform developedby three main research groups:
 AIT’s intERLab
2
laboratory, INRIA
3
institute,
and the
WIDE Project 
4
team
. They wheremotivated by the tsunami event in 2004 which devastatedseveral areas in countries along shores of Indian Ocean, andcaused the breakdown of telecommunications infrastructure.DUMBO is developed to provide multimediacommunication among field team members and with adistant command headquarter. It is designed for collaborativesimultaneous emergency response operations deployed in anumber of disaster affected areas.The architecture of DUMBONET (Fig. 2) combinesmobile ad hoc networks (MANET) and a satellite IPnetwork. A MANET is deployed on each isolated disastersite and satellite accesses allow multimedia communicationbetween different sites and with the distant commandheadquarter [1] [5].We distinguish three categories of bidirectionalcommunications: intra-site, site to headquarter, and site tosite communications. Site to site traffic must pass through aterrestrial satellite gateway.Three main applications are deployed on DUMBONET:
•
 
Multimedia applications including video, voice, andshort messages;Fig. 2. Architecture of DUMBONET
2
http://www.interlab.ait.ac.th/ (Thailand)
3
http://www.inria.fr/index.en.html (France)
4
http://www.wide.ad.jp/ (Japan)
•
 
Sensor applications for measuring and identifyingenvironmental and potentially harmful factors that mayaffect the rescue operation, such as: temperature,humidity, rainfall, wind speed, etc;
•
 
Face recognition application that allows a rescuer tocompare face images captured from the site to adatabase of known faces.DUMBONET is at the first stage of deployment.Experiments have been done only with two isolated disastersites and a simulated headquarter.
 B.
 
WISECOM project 
WISECOM [3] (Wireless Infrastructure over Satellite forEmergency COMmunications) is an ongoing project createdby the German Aerospace Center and funded by theEuropean Commission. The WISECOM project aims atdeveloping a complete telecommunication solution that canbe rapidly deployed immediately after a disaster. TheWISECOM system intends to restore local GSMinfrastructures so that normal mobile phones can be used,and to provide wireless data access over WiFi and WiMAXusing satellite communication. The system incorporates alsolocation based services for the purposes of locating victimsand rescue teams.The WISECOM architecture includes one of the twoparticular European portable satellite systems, namely:
 Inmarsat, BGAN 
5
and
 DVB-RCS
6 
. Wireless local accesspoints are also used for enabling the emergency personaland/or victims to access the network using standard WiFienabled devices (laptops, PDAs, WiFi phones, etc.). Thelocal WiFi hotspots are deployed around the vehicles toprovide wide area coverage, up to 1 kilometer, to therescuers within a WiFi cell. The WiFi hotspots are in turnconnected to the satellite access point using 802.16dWiMAX links over a radius of up to 10 kilometers. All of therequired equipments can be rapidly transported to thedisaster site in a normal car or as standard luggage on aFig. 3. Architecture of WISECOM
5
http://broadband.inmarsat.com
6
http://www.dvb.org
 
CNTA ’09 Université A.MIRA BEJAIAplane. The WISECOM architecture is illustrated in Fig. 3.The first experimental test of the WISECOM system hasbeen performed in March 2008. This test validated thenetwork functionalities, and allowed to verify the correctoperation of applications such as file transfer, web browsing,VoIP, videoconferencing and video streaming.
C.
 
 RESCUE project 
The goal of the RESCUE project [8] (RESponding toCrises and Unexpected Events) is to radically transform theability of responding organizations to gather, manage, use,and disseminate information both within emergencyresponse networks and to the general public. With morerobust information systems, response can be prioritized, andfocused to activities that have the highest potential to savelives and property.Such a radical transformation requires a multidisciplinaryapproach that recognizes that while information technologyis paramount. A thorough understanding of how emergencyorganizations form and work together in crisis situations isvital to the solution. Based on this understanding, the teamproposes a research program that consists of five majormultidisciplinary research projects:
•
 
Situation awareness (SAMI) which goal is to design anddevelop technologies that can create actionablesituational awareness from the heterogeneous multimodal data streams (audio, speech, text, video, etc.)including human-generated input (e.g., first responders’communications, field reports, etc.) during or after adisaster. SAMI undertakes an event-oriented approachto building situational awareness.
•
 
Information sharing (PISA) which objective is tounderstand data sharing and privacy policies of organizations and individuals; and design, develop, andevaluate a flexible, customizable, robust, scalable,policy-driven architecture for information sharing.
•
 
Robust communications (ENS) which objective is todevelop systems that provide computing,communication, and higher layer services at a crisis site.The goal is to develop a system that can operate underextreme conditions by consolidating and enhancingavailable systems and seamlessly extending newcapabilities to all end users and devices ascommunication services get incrementally restored.
•
 
Information dissemination focuses on information that isdisseminated to the public at large specifically toencourage self-protective actions, such as evacuationfrom endangered areas, sheltering-in-place, and otheractions designed to reduce exposure to natural andhuman-induced threats. The grand challenges that areaddressed include building highly scalable, reliable andtimely dissemination services from unstable andunreliable resources using a peer-based architecture forboth wired and wireless dissemination.Fig. 4. Architecture of Disaster Portal System
•
 
Privacy is concerned with determining "best practices"(minimal data collection, limiting informationdisclosure/inference, establishing clear policies forinformation collection/use/sharing, etc.), exploring howsuch practices can be realized technologically (policylanguages, enforcement mechanisms, information hidingtechniques such as data perturbation, anonymization,etc.), and studying how technological innovationinfluences technology adoption.Test beds have been created for evaluating RESCUEresearch and several products have been already developedsuch as: the Crisis Alert System to disseminate informationto schools and other organizations in case of disasters, theDisaster Web Portal that provides a wide range of real-timeinformation in disaster situations, such as situationsummaries, announcements, shelter information, andaggregated services such as family reunification anddonation management (Fig.4). A first version of this portalwas deployed by the City of Ontario in September 2007. Thecurrent system serves as a base to develop and refine resultsfrom several areas of research which are being incorporatedinto the existing system to provide additional or advancedcapabilities [20].
 D.
 
 Ad-Hoc InfoWare project 
The Ad-hoc InfoWare (Middleware Services forInformation Sharing in Ad-hoc Networks) project is createdby the Research Council of Norway
7
and the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences
8
at the University of Oslo.The project [11][15] implements a Middleware forinformation sharing in sparse ad hoc networks which useefficiently the available infrastructure in a rescue operation.It gives analysis of the different organizations structures andthe various interactions during a rescue operation. Also, itidentifies the technical challenges imposed by a such highlydynamic environment. The Middleware framework iscomposed of six components:
•
 
Data Management: is a distributed database;
•
 
Knowledge Management: to support the dissemination,sharing and interpretation of ontologies;
7
http://www.forskningsradet.no
8
http://www.matnat.uio.no
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Nadir BOUCHAMA

Nadia Nouali, Nadir Bouchama, Ahcène Bendjoudi, Abdelaziz Babakhouya, Said Yahiaoui, Yacine Belhoul, Houda Zeghilet, and Nabil Guellati, Using Information Technology for Enhancing Disaster Management. In Congrès National des Télécommunications et leurs Applications (CNTA' 09). University of Bejaia. Algeria. May, 23rd and 24th 2009.

reply12 / 21 / 2009
kganaga

I want to copy this contents

reply11 / 12 / 2009
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