Facing disasters—trends in applications to support disaster management

Abstract

Disaster Management is a complex process, usually dealing with a large amount of uncertain, incomplete and vague information, which normally requires the coordination and collaboration among a variety of actors. Technology offers new and exciting opportunities to deal with these challenges, but also may create new types of challenges that can overwhelm decision makers. The paper will offer insights on the innovative trends that can be found in applications designed to support disaster management addressing, in particular, the approaches that address preparedness and response stages. The work will look at the characteristics of different types of human interaction proposals considering applications, such as “serious games” for the preparedness phase or collaborative distributed intelligent systems for the response phase.