A natural-disaster management DSS for Humanitarian Non-Governmental Organisations

Abstract

Humanitarian Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) play a growing role in the response to natural disasters, but despite being largely demanded, there is no available decision support system (DSS) specifically designed to address their problem. In this paper we present a decision support system (DSS) to aid those Humanitarian NGOs concerned with the response to natural disasters. Such a DSS has been designed avoiding sophisticated methodologies that may exceed the infrastructural requirements and constraints of emergency management by NGOs. A data-based, two-level knowledge methodology which allows damage assessment of multiple disaster scenarios is presented in order to address that problem. Validation results show viability of our approach.