Alert based disaster notification and resource allocation

  • Authors:

  • Dickson K. Chiu;Drake T. Lin;Eleanna Kafeza;Minhong Wang;Haiyang Hu;Hua Hu;Yi Zhuang

  • Affiliations:

  • Dickson Computer Systems, Kowloon, Hong Kong and Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong;Department of Marketing and Communications, Athens University of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece 10434;Division of Information and Technology Studies, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong;College of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, China and State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China;College of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, China and Hangzhou Dianzi University, Zhejiang, China;College of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, China and Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Information Network Technology, Hangzhou, China

  • Venue:
  • Information Systems Frontiers
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

When a disaster occurs, timely actions in response to urgent requests conveyed by critical messages (known as alerts) constitute a vital key to effectiveness. These actions include notifying potentially affected parties so that they can take precautionary measures, gathering additional information, and requesting remedial actions and resource allocation. However, there are different types of disasters such as epidemic outbreaks, natural disasters, major accidents, and terrorist attacks. At the same time, there are also many different parties involved such as governments, healthcare institutions, businesses, and individuals. To address these problems, we introduce a Disaster Notification and Resource Allocation System (DNRAS) based on an Alert Management System (AMS) implemented through Web services. This unified platform supports timely interactions among various parties, focusing on notification and monitoring, resource enquiry and allocation, as well as the mobility of information. We detail the mechanisms of these functions in our system, illustrating the Web services interface parameters for communications and interoperability. We illustrate the applicability of our approach with an example of an epidemic outbreak and discuss the advantage of our approach with respect to various stakeholders of our system.