Irene Pluchinotta

Modelling the complexity of the network of interactions in flood emergency management: The Lorca flash flood case

Abstract There is growing awareness that fast response to emergency situation requires effective coordination among several institutional and non-institutional actors. The most common approaches, based on innovating technologies for information collection and management, are not sufficient to cope with the increasing complexity of emergency management. This work demonstrates that effective cooperation claims for a shift from information management to interaction management. Therefore, methods and tools are required in order to better understand the complexity of the interactions taking place during an emergency, and to analyse the actual roles and responsibilities of the different actors. This paper details the design and implementation of an integrated approach aiming to unravel the complexity of the interaction network based on Storytelling, the Problem Structuring Method, and Social Network Analysis. The potential of the integrated approach has been investigated in the Lorca (Spain) flood risk management case study.

Collective Intelligence Support Protocol

The collaborative architectural design process can be difficult to generate and maintain, especially when consisting of large teams, time constraints and long distance as it requires a higher sense of working together. However, a formal description of collaborative design as a system made of elements, agents, sub-systems and relationships could open a path to potentially improve production efficiency and stream collective intelligence. The CISP is a first attempt methodology to support collaborative design based on the empirical analysis of a single case study involving a multi-disciplinary team competing in an international architectural idea competition. The methodology operates through interdependencies on three layers: organization, planning and shared workspace. By articulating methods, tools, team members and project phases, the CISP fosters an integrated design system and a fluent design process.

Dealing with Uncertainty in Decision-Making for Drinking Water Supply Systems Exposed to Extreme Events

The availability and the quality of drinking water are key requirements for the well-being and the safety of a community, both in ordinary conditions and in case of disasters. Providing safe drinking water in emergency contributes to limit the intensity and the duration of crises, and is thus one of the main concerns for decision-makers, who operate under significant uncertainty. The present work proposes a Decision Support System for the emergency management of drinking water supply systems, integrating: i) a vulnerability assessment model based on Bayesian Belief Networks with the related uncertainty assessment model; ii) a model for impact, and related uncertainty assessment, based on Bayesian Belief Networks. The results of these models are jointly analyzed, providing decision-makers with a ranking of the priority of intervention. A GIS interface (G-Net) is developed to manage both input spatial information and results. The methodology is implemented in L’Aquila case study, discussing the potentialities associated to the use of the tool dealing with information and data uncertainty.

Supporting environmental planning: Knowledge management through fuzzy cognitive mapping

The inherently complex nature of the environmental domain requires that planning efforts become projects of participated, inclusive, multi-agent, multi-source knowledge building processes developed by the community. Knowledge is often hard to be processed, handled, formalized, modeled. Yet cognitive models are useful to avoid the typical unmanageability of domains with high complexity such as the environmental one, and enhance knowledge organization and management. We have investigated on the potentials of cognitive-mapping-based tools, particularly on cross impact evaluations, in the case study of Taranto (Italy). The process was aimed at building up future development scenarios in city neighborhoods, and fuzzy cognitive mapping were used to support decision-making by exploring cross impacts of possible policy perspectives. Although substantial results are rather general, the study proves to be interesting in enhancing the potentials of FCM-based approach to support decisionmaking, particularly when dealing with well-focused policy perspectives.

Studying the generation of alternatives in public policy making processes

The design of alternatives is an essential part of decision making that has been less studied in theory and practice compared to alternatives’ evaluation. This topic is particularly relevant in the context of public policy making, where policy design represents a crucial step of the policy cycle since it determines the quality of the alternative policies being considered. This paper attempts to formalise the decision aiding process in two real interventions dealing with alternatives’ generation for territorial policy making in Italy. The aim of this research is to understand what generates novelty within the alternatives’ design phase of a decision aiding process, i.e. what allows to expand the solution space and discover new alternatives to solve the problem under consideration. It demonstrates ways in which novelty in decision processes can be supported by Operational Research/Multicriteria Decision Aiding tools. The two case studies are used to answer the following questions: (i) Why have new alternatives arose during the policy making process? (ii) How have they been generated? (iii) Which consequences did they lead to? and (iv) What generated novelty in the process? The results highlight two main reasons that can expand the solution space within a decision aiding process: (i) dissatisfaction (of the client, of the analyst or of the relevant stakeholders, especially when dealing with public policies) with respect to the solutions currently proposed to the decision making problem and (ii) opportunity for a change in one of the variables/constraints.

Integrating “Hard” and “Soft” Infrastructural Resilience Assessment for Water Distribution Systems

Cities are highly dynamic systems, whose resilience is affected by the interconnectedness between “hard” and “soft” infrastructures. “Hard infrastructures” are the functional networks with physical elements providing goods or services. “Soft infrastructures” (culture, governance, and social patterns) encompass the social networks, make the hard infrastructures work, and are vital for understanding the consequences of disasters and the effectiveness of emergency management. Although the dynamic interactions between such infrastructures are highly complex in the case of the occurrence of hazardous events, it is fundamental to analyze them. The reliability of hard infrastructures during emergency management contributes to keep alive the social capital, while the community, its networks, and its own resilience influence the service provided by infrastructural systems. Resilience-thinking frameworks overcome the limits of the traditional engineering-oriented approaches, accounting for complexity of socio-technical-organizational networks, bridging the static and dynamic components of disasters across pre- and postevent contexts. The present work develops an integrated approach to operatively assess resilience for the hard and soft infrastructural systems, aiming at modeling the complexity of their interaction by adopting a graph theory-based approach and social network analysis. The developed approach has been experimentally implemented for assessing the integrated resilience of the hard/soft infrastructures during the L’Aquila 2009 earthquake.