Bartel Van de Walle

Decision support for emergency situations

Emergency situations occur unpredictably and cause individuals and organizations to shift their focus and attention immediately to deal with the situation. When disasters become large scale, all the limitations resulting from a lack of integration and collaboration among all the involved organizations begin to be exposed and further compound the negative consequences of the event. Often in large-scale disasters the people who must work together have no history of doing so; they have not developed a trust or understanding of one another’s abilities, and the totality of resources they each bring to bear have never before been exercised. As a result, the challenges for individual or group decision support systems (DSS) in emergency situations are diverse and immense. In this contribution, we present recent advances in this area and highlight important challenges that remain.

Open source software for disaster management

Evaluating how the Sahana disaster information system coordinates disparate institutional and technical resources in the wake of the Indian Ocean tsunami.

Toward Virtual Community Knowledge Evolution

This paper puts forth a vision and an architecture for a community knowledge evolution system. We propose augmenting a multimedia document repository (digital library) with innovative knowledge evolution support, including computer-mediated communications, community process support, decision support, advanced hypermedia features, and conceptual knowledge structures. These tools, and the techniques developed around them, would enable members of a virtual community to learn from, contribute to, and collectively build upon the communitys knowledge and improve many member tasks. The resulting Collaborative Knowledge Evolution Support System (CKESS) would provide an enhanced digital library infrastructure serving as an ever-evolving repository of the communitys knowledge, which members would actively use in everyday tasks and regularly update.

Social media and SMS in the haiti earthquake

We describe some first results of an empirical study describing how social media and SMS were used in coordinating humanitarian relief after the Haiti Earthquake in January 2010. Current information systems for crisis management are increasingly incorporating information obtained from citizens transmitted via social media and SMS. This information proves particularly useful at the aggregate level. However it has led to some problems: information overload and processing difficulties, variable speed of information delivery, managing volunteer communities, and the high risk of receiving inaccurate or incorrect information.

Humanitarian Information Management and Systems

In times of major disasters such as hurricane Katrina or the Sichuan earthquake, the need for accurate and timely information is as crucial as is rapid and coherent coordination among the responding humanitarian community. Effective humanitarian information systems that provide timely access to comprehensive, relevant, and reliable information are critical to humanitarian operations. The faster the humanitarian community is able to collect, analyze, disseminate and act on key information, the more effective the response will be, the better needs will be met, and the greater the benefit to the affected populations. This paper presents fundamental principles of humanitarian information management as endorsed by the international humanitarian community, introduces generic systems design premises and presents two recent collaborative efforts in humanitarian information systems development.

Risk Accelerators in Disasters

Modern societies are increasingly threatened by disasters that require rapid response through ad-hoc collaboration among a variety of actors and organizations. The complexity within and across today’s societal, economic and environmental systems defies accurate predictions and assessments of damages, humanitarian needs, and the impact of aid. Yet, decision-makers need to plan, manage and execute aid response under conditions of high uncertainty while being prepared for further disruptions and failures. This paper argues that these challenges require a paradigm shift: instead of seeking optimality and full efficiency of procedures and plans, strategies should be developed that enable an acceptable level of aid under all foreseeable eventualities. We propose a decision- and goal-oriented approach that uses scenarios to systematically explore future developments that may have a major impact on the outcome of a decision. We discuss to what extent this approach supports robust decision-making, particularly if time is short and the availability of experts is limited. We interlace our theoretical findings with insights from experienced humanitarian decision makers we interviewed during a field research trip to the Philippines in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan.

Information management and humanitarian relief coordination: findings from the Haiti earthquake response

The overwhelming humanitarian impact of the January 2010 Earthquake in Haiti created a tremendous coordination challenge for the humanitarian relief agencies. In this paper, we first describe the coordination mechanisms that are implemented by the United Nations and the role of its Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). We introduce the cluster approach, which is instrumental in providing a more efficient and effective coordination in affected disaster areas. The main thrust of our paper is on the role and use of information management (IM) in these coordination efforts. To understand better the benefits and problems of information systems, we conducted interviews with experienced information managers who participated in the Haiti relief effort. While the interviewees saw clear benefits of IM for the coordination of humanitarian relief, concerns related to information overload, reliability and accountability were found to impede the realisation of the full potential of IM.

A Call for Sensemaking Support Systems in Crisis Management

In this chapter, we explore four information processing challenges commonly experienced in crisis situations, which form the basis of the design of information systems that should support actors in these situations. When we explore the difference between Sensemaking and decision making, two activities that are undertaken to cope with information processing challenges, we can understand the two types of information systems support that are needed. The first type—decision support systems—supports actors in dealing with information-related problems of uncertainty and complexity, and is the traditional focus of information systems design. The second type—sensemaking support systems—should support actors in dealing with problems of frames of reference, ambiguity, and equivocality, but is not commonplace yet. We conducted three case studies in different crisis situations to explore these information processing challenges: A case study of the sudden crisis of an airplane crash in the Barents Rescue Exercise, a case study of the yearly recurring forest fires crises in Portugal, and a case study of the post-conflict European Union Police Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We discuss design premises for crisis management information systems and compare these to our findings, and observe that systems designed accordingly will provide for the necessary Sensemaking support.

ISCRAM: growing a global R&D community on information systems for crisis response and management

In only two years since its beginning in April 2004, an active and international group of researchers, scholars, teachers, students, practitioners and policymakers concerned with the subject of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM) has evolved into a global R&D community. In addition to annual conferences in Europe and the USA, the ISCRAM Community established an online presence through iscram.org with close to a thousand registered users from 80 different countries. In this short communication, we introduce the ISCRAM R&D community and provide an overview of its current activities. We also present a number of emerging themes within the community and the research and development agenda this could define.

Serious Gaming for User Centered Innovation and Adoption of Disaster Response Information Systems

Global profusion of information technology has spawned a large and varied number of tools and systems to aid disaster responders in managing disaster-related information. To adequately study the conception, development and deployment of such tools and systems, the user and the operational context in which user tasks are performed play a central role. As natural disasters however happen unexpectedly, often occur in remote areas and always impose working conditions of high time pressure and high situational volatility, user involvement is difficult to achieve for adequately studying tools and systems in disaster conditions. Current approaches for adoption in disaster conditions are therefore either resource intensive or lack realism, or both. This paper proposes the use of serious games to balance the realism of a disaster situation with an efficient and effective study setup and execution. Building on existing literature for serious gaming, it presents a serious game that focuses on the information management and decision making processes in an urban search and rescue setting. Through several game instances that have been played in the past three years, it examines the usefulness of serious games as a method to conduct research, to facilitate user centered development and to support dissemination activities.