2014 1st International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Disaster Management (ICT-DM)

SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems are required to deal with increasingly complex and critical situation. They must constantly evolve towards integrated decision making and policy driven by cyber security requirements. The current research stream in that domain aims, accordingly, to foster the smartness of the field equipment's and processes, which principally exist through t... View full abstract»

Emergency plans (EP) are complex systems which must be executed under time and efficiency constraints. They include elements of three different natures, technical, human and organizational where complex relationships exist between them. This inherent complexity may leads to a number of failures, such as unavailability of critical personnel or technical assets and inappropriate operators' actions. ... View full abstract»

The intent of the present work is to identify the main challenges and key requirements towards the provision of an integrated framework that supports decision making and collaboration among multiple actors concerned by disaster management (DM). Also, this work highlights the importance of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in this field and proposes an IT-based platform to implement ... View full abstract»

The occurrence of a tsunami after an earthquake in a coastal zone is very probable but not certain. This situation leads to a difficult decision about the best action to take: to evacuate or not. Tsunami Early Warning Systems (TEWS) are designed to clarify this situation informing people if there is real danger for them. On the other side, automation technologies used in the industry share a lot o... View full abstract»

The quality, data amount and information content of GeoInformation Systems (GIS) dealing with natural hazards and vulnerability assessment has increased considerably during the last decades. Meanwhile many countries have implemented such a GIS for the public use, whereby satellite imageries before and after disasters form important layers within these GIS. In the scope of this research adaptation ... View full abstract»

Landslides have caused severe damages in the northeastern Algeria mountain region during the last decades. The present research use a raster-based GIS and statistical processing with a probabilistic method (multiple logistic regression approach, LR) for landslides hazard assessment and mapping in Machrouha municipality. Data included digitized geology, slopes, exposure, elevations, forests, roads,... View full abstract»

Plague of modern times, the phenomenon of the trafic accidents hampers heavily resources of the society. The road mows every year thousands of deaths and tens of thousands wounded. This frightening number of victims requires a study of this phenomenon in order to extract all indicators affecting this problem and allow proposing preventive measures. Most current studies ignore the integration of ge... View full abstract»

Modern technology has now reached a point where improved safety can only be achieved through a better understanding of human error mechanisms. Much of the theoretical structure have a particular importance is the identification of cognitive processes common to a wide variety of error types. The “Reason's model” helps to understand the causes of accidents and to highlight the complexity of cause an... View full abstract»

Analyzing past earthquakes and their characteristics, perhaps a better understanding about the earthquake phenomena can be made. Pressure built-up due to tectonic activities and also associated subsurface degassing might create changes in thermal regime and if by any technique this change is detected, it can provide very important clues about future earthquake activities. Passive thermal satellite... View full abstract»

The assessment of urban seismic vulnerability should always account for the robustness and uncertainty of the used methods. This paper presents a comparison on preliminary evaluations of expected damage within an urban district of the city of Oran (Algeria) in order to exploit a non-dedicated set of data issued from a technical survey of the buildings. Three different methods are used (GNDT 2; RIS... View full abstract»

This article is a first step towards bridging the gap between User-centered design and agile principles integration in order to provide service designers/developers with a comprehensive framework to the design, implementation and deployment of SOA based interactive services. This approach is applied to a typical disaster management case study to demonstrate its feasibility. View full abstract»

Medical evacuation is one of the most important modules in the emergency plans activated during disaster situations. It aims at evacuating victims to the most appropriate health-care facilities. Evacuation plans were for a long time performed approximatively and passively rather than optimally and proactively between the disposal site and the targeted hospital and they often lacked visibility on t... View full abstract»

In this paper, we propose to model the disaster mitigation, search and rescue problem with a Decentralized Markov Decision Process (DEC-MDP). This type of problem is confronted to several impediments like the time pressure, the lack of resources, ... However, the basic DEC-MDP model does not include any constraint on the execution of tasks. Thus, the aim of this work is to adapt the DEC-MDP in ord... View full abstract»

The dynamic adaptation of running service-based applications has long been shown to be more than a dream for developers. Recently, several works have been proposed in the literature, where most of them do not have a clear and complete process of such an adaptation. To perform a dynamic adaptation for context-aware service-based applications, we are aiming at presenting in this paper a software arc... View full abstract»

This paper aims to propose a process for discovering mobile web services in a peer to peer architecture that is based on clustering. Since its birth, the paradigm of web services, which is the result of the combination of web services technologies and those of the mobile networks, allows one to facilitate the management of business processes. The proposed approach is based on the concept of cluste... View full abstract»

Blida is located in the north part of Algeria, classified zone III, an area with high vulnerability to seismic hazard according to the Algerian Seismic Code (RPA99 version 2003). The city has known a big development within its urban, administrative, industrial, commercial, leisure and sanitary sectors during these last years. As several destructive earthquakes had already shaken the city in the pa... View full abstract»