The 58th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-58) was recently held from January 7-10 at Waikiki, the island of Oahu, Hawaii, organised by University of Hawaii at Manoa. The Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) has been known worldwide as the longest-standing working scientific conferences in Information Technology Management. Since 1968, HICSS has provided a highly interactive working environment for top scholars from academia and the industry from over 60 countries to exchange ideas in various areas of information, computer, and system sciences.
In the HICSS-58, Rouba Iskandar from the University of Grenoble Alps, France presented her paper “A Framework for Constructing Agent-based Models for Evaluating Emergency Evacuation Procedures; A Case Study Applied to Egaleo, Greece“ in the Disaster Information, Resilience, for Emergency and Crisis Technologies mini-track. The paper is a case study implemented at Egaleo, Greece, a seismic-prone region and one of the case study areas of the C2IMPRESS Project. The paper is co-authored by Hossein Moradi, Sebastian Rodriguez, Dhirendra Singh, Julie Dugdale, Dimitrios Tzempelikos, and Athanasios Sfetsos- members of the C2IMPRESS Consortium.
Abstract
Planning and preparing for evacuations of populations during emergencies requires a multifaceted approach covering the essential concerns of understanding hazard risk, preparing critical infrastructure for egress and shelter, determining the makeup of the population at risk, understanding how that population will respond in the event of an emergency, and developing robust evacuation procedures and policies. While tools and methods often exist for understanding these concerns separately, these do not allow decision-makers to systematically understand their interconnections and the implication of change in one dimension on the other. To address this challenge, we introduce a comprehensive framework designed to assist emergency management decision-makers in evaluating community evacuation plans. Central to our approach is the use of micro-simulations that model known human behaviors in emergencies for evacuating populations. Our framework, encompassing the five dimensions of Infrastructure, Population Demographics, Evacuation Policy, Hazard Model, and Human Behavior Model, allows users to systematically build ”what-if” scenarios that introduce changes in different dimensions to test the robustness of evacuation policies. We present a case study of employing this framework in Egaleo, Greece, a seismic-prone region, as part of the European HORIZON project C2IMPRESS, in collaboration with local government. We showcase the effectiveness and relevance of our approach in enhancing emergency response strategies within dynamic and high-stakes environments.
Read the full paper: https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/4f1ec54a-44ca-4bb9-be8f-ab6ac93d5451/content
About Rouba Iskandar
Rouba Iskandar is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Grenoble Informatics Lab (LIG) at the University Grenoble Alps. She completed her PhD in Earth Sciences from the University Grenoble Alps in 2022, and prior to that, she obtained a master’s degree in Geo-hazards from the University Grenoble Alps and a Civil Engineering degree from the Lebanese University. Her research focuses mainly on natural hazards, which she analyses using an interdisciplinary approach that combines Earth, Computer, and Social Sciences. Rouba Iskandar is particularly interested in crisis management in the context of natural disasters, which requires an understanding of the elements at interplay- from a holistic and an interdisciplinary perspective. Her research relies on and contributes to concepts and methods from Earth and Engineering Sciences: assessment of hazard consequences on urban features; Computer Sciences: agent-based modeling and simulations; and Social Sciences: human behavior in crisis.