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2013 |
Journal ArticleJosé H. Canós, Marcos R.S. Borges, M. Carmen Penadés, Abel Gómez, Manuel Llavador Improving emergency plans management with SAGA In: Technological Forecasting and Social Change, vol. 80, no. 9, pp. 1868 - 1876, 2013, ISSN: 0040-1625, (Planning and Foresight Methodologies in Emergency Preparedness and Management). Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Emergency Management, Emergency Plans Development and Improvement, Information Systems (IS), SAGA @article{Canos:TFSC:2013,Emergency plans are the tangible result of the preparedness activities of the emergency management lifecycle. In many countries, public service organizations have the legal obligation to develop and maintain emergency plans covering all possible hazards relative to their areas of operation. However, little support is provided to planners in the development and use of plans. Often, advances in software technology have not been exploited, and plans remain as text documents whose accessibility is very limited. In this paper, we advocate for the definition and implementation of plan management processes as the first step to better produce and manage emergency plans. The main contribution of our work is to raise the need for IT-enabled planning environments, either at the national or organization-specific levels, which can lead to more uniform plans that are easier to evaluate and share, with support to stakeholders other than responders, among other advantages. To illustrate our proposal, we introduce SAGA, a framework that supports the full lifecycle of emergency plan management. SAGA provides all the actors involved in plan management with a number of tools to support all the stages of the plan lifecycle. We outline the architecture of the system, and show with a case study how planning processes can benefit from a system like SAGA. |
2012 |
ConferenceJosé H. Canós, M. Carmen Penadés, Abel Gómez, Marcos R.S. Borges SAGA: An Integrated Architecture for the Management of Advanced Emergency Plans ISCRAM 2012 Conference Proceedings – 9th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, 2012, ISBN: 978-0-86491-332-6 . Abstract | Links | BibTeX | Tags: Emergency Management, Emergency Plans Development and Improvement, Information Systems (IS), SAGA @conference{Canos:ISCRAM:2012,Despite the significant advances that software and hardware technologies have brought to the emergency management field, some islands remain where innovation has had little impact. Among them, emergency plan management is of particular relevance due to their key role in the direction of teams during responses. Aspects like coordination, collaboration, and others are spread in plain text sentences, impeding automatic tool support to improve team per-formance. Moreover, administrative management of plans becomes a mere document management activity. In this paper, we present SAGA, an architecture that supports the full lifecycle of advanced emergency plan management. By advanced we mean plans that include new types of interaction such as hypermedia and advanced process definition languages to provide precise specification of response procedures. SAGA provides all the actors involved in plan management a number of tools supporting all the stages of the plan lifecycle, from its creation to its use in training drills or actual responses. It is intended to be instantiated in systems promoted by civil defense agencies, providing administrative support to plan management; additionally, editing tools for plan designers and tools for analysis and improvement of such plans by organizations are provided. Plan enactment facilities in emergency response are also integrated. To our knowledge, it is the very first proposal that covers all the aspects of plan management. Open Access |