With respect to disasters, earthquake is one of the leading causes of death. Its aftermath can be abated if proper actions take place before the onset of the earthquake. Various sectors in a country are responsible for managing disasters, but the lack of knowledge about the positive effects of their actions makes them reluctant to act decisively. Retrofitting buildings and structures, positioni...

Effective disaster recovery planning, execution, and testing are essential to manage the risk of business interruption that arises from a myriad of sources such as fire, natural or manmade disasters, sabotage, or technical or human operational failures. The Municipal Software Services, Inc (MSS) case describes a company that was faced with a catastrophic fire. The MSS case provides a realistic ...

Change design is one of the key steps within the IT change management process and involves defining the set of activities required for the implementation of a change. Despite its importance, existing approaches for automating this step disregard the impact that actions will cause on the affected elements of the IT infrastructure. As a consequence, activities that compose the change plan may not...

In this article, we propose and evaluate a Mega Disaster Crisis Management System consisting of the Disaster Information Registration System and the Disaster Information Sharing System. The former categorizes various disaster information on real time reported from residents and the disaster related institutions. This registration system processes a flood of disaster information rapidly. The lat...

We construct and evaluate an integrated disaster information cloud system at the time of mega disaster. The integrated disaster information cloud system comprises the disaster information input function, disaster information output function, disaster information transmit function, department management function, and past disaster management function. In this article, we described the disaster i...

Image processing has been proved to be an effective tool for analysis in various fields and applications in engineering. Among the segmentation methods, image thresholding technique is one of the most well-known methods due to its simplicity, robustness, and high precision. The primary objective of image processing is to optimize visualization of particular thematic data set. The type of image ...

The Haddon Matrix offers a classic epidemiological model for studying injury prevention. This methodology places the public health concepts of agent, host, and environment within the three sequential phases of an injury-producing incident-pre-event, event, and postevent. This study uses this methodology to illustrate how it could be applied in systematically preparing for a mass casualty disast...

A very fast pose-graph relaxation technique is introduced in this article for enhancing the consistency of 3D maps created by registering large planar surface patches. The surface patches are extracted from point-clouds sampled from a 3D range-sensor. The registration method offers an alternative to state of the art algorithms and provides advantages in terms of robustness, speed and storage. I...

Recent events have revealed significant shortcomings in Public Safety and Disaster Recovery (PSDR) communications. A lot of currently deployed PSDR communication technology suffers from lack of interoperability and reliability in disaster scenarios. Furthermore, even the most advanced PSDR communication systems do not provide true broadband capabilities to support bandwidth intensive applicatio...

In this paper, we propose the Real-time Disaster Damage Information Sharing System for the disaster countermeasures headquarters at the time of large-scale natural disaster. This Real-time Disaster Damage Information Sharing System consists of the Post Damage Picture Smartphone Application, the Post Damage Picture Facebook Application, and the Web-GIS Disaster Information Management Site. The P...