Table-top exercises are widely used to train complex scenarios while representing real world events. However, structured data collection and evaluation are usually limited in such exercises. To foster decision support based on the findings, this paper describes the relevant components advancing conventional towards digitalized table-top exercises by introducing a hybrid model-based approach. The underlying conceptualizations and the physical components to digitalize such exercises are presented in conjunction with a proof-of-concept – the Scenario Scanner. Project MEASURE is introduced to reflect on the model-based digitalization of table-top exercises. It transfers the approach to the emergency management domain, where table-top exercises are a commonly used tool to simulate the response to potential hazards. The Scenario Scanner is configured for an emergency scenario and selected application samples are presented. The discussion presents how results derived from table-top exercises could be linked to functional or full-scale emergency exercises and covers further potential use cases.
We model the use-case of cyber espionage for the purpose of game simulations for training executives that lack technical proficiency preparing for the implementation of the NIS2 directive in EU member states. In the first part of the paper, we lay out the common practices of classifying cyber attacks and cyber defense measures suggested by a strong body of literature in the field of cyber security. We formally validate the requirements of a use-case for game simulations and argue for cyber espionage being a purposeful use-case for executive training. In the second part, we explain our two models that demonstrate the functionality, behavior and activity sequence of our proposed executive game simulation for the use-case of cyber espionage. Finally, we discuss avenues for game development and testing.
This conference paper investigates the "virtualization of terrorism," highlighting how digital technologies facilitate extremist activities along the entire value chain of ideologically motivated violence- from radicalization to attack execution. It emphasizes that terrorists now extensively utilize online platforms for secure communication, recruitment, and operational planning, significantly altering the landscape of modern terrorism. Referring to case studies of notable attacks, such as the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing and the 2019 Halle synagogue shooting, the study aims at illustrating how perpetrators leveraged online resources for radicalization and attack preparation. The research paper also discusses the rise of Generation Z as a new wave of perpetrators, influenced by platforms like TikTok, which has become a tool for recruiting and radicalizing youth. Encrypted messaging apps further complicate counterterrorism efforts by enabling secure communication among extremists. Conclusively, the study underscores the urgent need for adaptive counterterrorism strategies to address the challenges posed by the virtualization of terrorism, which allows for greater anonymity and operational flexibility for terrorists. The findings call for a reevaluation of current approaches to effectively combat the evolving threat landscape shaped by digital technologies.
In the context of disaster response, information is crucial for adequate decision-making. This raises the question of an ethical duty to seek evidence. The paper at hand explores the ethical justification of this duty, addressing the complexities of moral responsibility when morally relevant decisions have to be made and respective actions have to be taken when insufficient information is available. The main ethical problem lies in the potential moral responsibility for actions committed because of ignorance (in the sense of Aristotle), which, intuitively, could be considered as being involuntary. To deal with this issue, the paper at hand proposes an epistemic diachronic ethical duty to seek more evidence in the context of disaster response and justifies it within a consequentialist ethical framework, which, as such, particularly requires minimising the costs and maximising the value of the evidence obtained. While the integration of geo-informatics technologies has the potential to significantly reduce costs and increase the quality of evidence, enhancing decision-making outcomes, it also raises new ethical challenges, including biases, discrimination, and privacy concerns. The paper also briefly addresses possible justification approaches within deontological and aretaic ethics. It is argued that further research on the ethical integration of emerging technologies is needed, which, in particular, involves understanding cultural differences in disaster response and developing comprehensive training programs for disaster professionals to navigate these ethical dilemmas effectively.
First observed in 2020, a phenomenon of increasingly damaging proportions has surfaced in need of both emergency managers and seafarers’ attention: Some members of the Iberian Residential Orca population have been interacting with and damaging human-operated seagoing vessels mainly in the Western entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar and the Gulf of Cádiz as well as along vast stretches of the Atlantic Iberian coastline. So far, no human losses have been recorded despite the sinking of several sailboats by these orcas. However, it appears only as matter of When rather than of If that such fatalities will be recorded, which will then transfer this particular wild-animal-human interaction onto a new level of urgency and directly into the realm of emergency management. As an effective self-help mechanism, recreational sailors have created social-media groups, which report the location of orca sightings and interactions in almost real time. Local authorities in Portugal, Morocco, and Spain are also on the alert providing advice to the fishing and recreational sailing communities. In this article, a multidisciplinary approach is undertaken that aims at improving the situational awareness of both emergency responders and sailing/fishing communities. It further attempts to identify a pathway towards developing appropriate measures of preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery.
In recent years, the number of foreign tourists visiting Japan has increased. However, Japan is prone to natural disasters, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, as well as river flooding caused by typhoons and heavy rains. When such natural disasters occur, foreign tourists visiting Japan may suffer serious harm because of a lack of language proficiency and information on how to respond. This paper proposes a tourism and disaster prevention information portal site to enable foreign tourists visiting Japan to have a safe and enjoyable sightseeing trip. This portal site allows users to search for sightseeing trip plans in Japan, learn disaster prevention knowledge to deal with natural disasters in Japan, and obtain multilingual smartphone apps with guidance for actions to take for disaster prevention during sightseeing trips. In this study, the author and students at Yamato University and Iwate Prefectural University built a prototype tourism and disaster prevention information portal site for foreign tourists visiting the 2025 Osaka World Expo. In the future, we will conduct evaluation experiments on this portal site and use them to improve it and build a more ideal system.
The article discusses the renewed importance of air-raid shelters or sheltering sites in contemporary times, acknowledging insights from the conflict in Ukraine and the historical neglect of shelter maintenance since the Cold War. In later years, a knowledge gap on understanding the role of air-raid shelters has developed among younger generations, and a full war in Europe requiring air-raid shelters was almost unthinkable for many, especially in Western Europe. Background history and today's practices concerning air-raid shelters in Estonia and Norway is explored, and experiments are performed to develop training for handling potential air-raid situations. To examine perceptions on need to seek shelter during air raid attacks and the perceived preparations needed for staying in such shelters, two workshops were conducted in Estonia and in Germany, each with 12 participants. The participants were introduced to the topic of air-raid shelters through fact-based presentations about air-raid shelters in Norway and Estonia, and assigned two tasks, to use the internet to find information about public air-raid shelters in their country and assess the quality of the information, and to identify and go to the closest safe place to seek shelter from the workshop site, while discussing essential items to bring. Furthermore, the distinction between shelter, bunker and sheltering site and their requirements is discussed. Finally, it is noted that the participants seemed to rely to a large degree on IT infrastructure and mobile communications, which may be unavailable in basements and shelters, or disrupted.
This paper proposes an orchestrator framework for reproducing complex disaster phenomena. Our orchestrator framework, based on the CyReal concept, integrates multiple simulators and systems through a federation bus, and enables effective collaboration and coordination among them using data exchange functions and time synchronization mechanisms. This framework allows for flexible integration of different types of simulators, enabling simultaneous modeling of diverse elements such as disaster phenomena, human behavior, and infrastructure conditions. The framework's performance was evaluated through load and scalability tests of a prototype, demonstrating its ability to handle increases in data volume and processing of multiple simulators with minimal impact. The prototype using simplified simulators represents a significant step towards creating a comprehensive cyber-physical system capable of addressing more complex disaster scenarios.
This paper investigates the case of the recent volcanic eruptions in Iceland, with the perspective of how the local communities were affected by the early warning and crisis communication, and the long stretches of time with little or no change in the situation, and the perception of danger eventually fading among some of the evacuees. Qualitative methods are used, and in particular, the authors use content analysis on local and international news articles to recreate a story line of an ongoing crisis from the first early warning, the events leading to each of the three eruptions up until mid-February 2024, seeing this from the perspectives of on one hand early warning crisis communication best practices, and on the other hand, cultural issues in crisis communication, normalcy bias, and warning fatigue.
In Japan, there is growing concern about tsunamis associated with potential Nankai Trough earthquakes, which are expected to cause significant damage. As countermeasures implemented solely by administrative bodies are insufficient, it is imperative for individual community residents to consider and implement tsunami countermeasures as their personal responsibility. Previous research has demonstrated that tsunami evacuation simulations can be effective tools in promoting local tsunami evacuation measures. However, due to the complexity of creating these simulations, they have not been widely utilized in communities without ongoing expert involvement. Therefore, this study proposes a residentled tsunami evacuation simulation approach, aiming to empower local residents to take the initiative in creating tsunami evacuation simulations and to facilitate their consideration and proposal of tsunami evacuation countermeasures within their communities. To achieve resident-led creation of tsunami evacuation simulations, we conducted a validation experiment targeting junior high school students, based on a tsunami evacuation simulation creation method proposed using Scratch. The experiment aimed to determine whether students could configure tsunami animations and create evacuation models, as well as to identify any challenges in the creation process. Results suggest that junior high school students could potentially set up tsunami animations and create evacuation models. Additionally, based on the identified challenges, an auxiliary program to assist in the creation of simulations was implemented for subsequent validation experiments.
Some communication vulnerabilities, such as cryptographic keys generated by a random number generator, have been identified during evacuation and recovery activities of a disaster. Due to some disfunctions of infrastructures and lack of guardiancies, sensitive data and illegal transactions may have occurred uncontrollable. One of the main causes of those communication vulnerabilities is the existence of the Random Number Generator (RNG) within the cryptosystem of network transaction with minimum infrastructures. The communication protection through cryptography cannot access the true RNG as it requires sophisticated and costly devices. To handle the situation, this research has investigated the Softwarebased True Random Number Generator (STRNG). In contrast to other TRNGs, the STRNG can be deployed using minimum capabilities of a processor, such as a Raspberry Pi. The technology can still generate high-entropy random numbers of unlimited number of digits, and the random number generator bitrate can reach up to 3 kbps. With the STRNG the communication can benefit it for the cryptography that will protect the communication from adversaries. Such secure communication will reduce the capability of potential adversaries that allowed by disaster have a bigger possibility to attack due to the communication vulnerabilities. As part of the bigger research scope, the positive results of the STRNG technology will then increase the quality of the whole framework of the Resilient Urban Development (RUD) project.
Community resilience has become a widely discussed concept in disaster management literature, as it promises to draw on the self-organization capacities of people and shifted the focus from individual and household preparedness to social networks. Relationality is important for community resilience, as community resilience depends on the relationship between institutions and local governance, as well as on the quality of the social bonds of the community members. Rather than focusing on the properties or functions of systems-as is typical in resilience research-relationality examines the relationships that constitute and drive these systems, which is important for disaster communication. This approach helps to understand how relationality can be improved to increase community resilience.
The use of autonomous systems equipped with the latest technological advances greatly facilitates response operations after a disaster. They can intervene, for example, in places that are inaccessible or dangerous for human rescuers. To be effective, these systems integrate increasingly advanced sensors and therefore become more and more linear. This considerably increases their capabilities but also the cost. It is therefore necessary to ensure the reliability of the system. The objective of this evaluation is to verify that the system survives and completes the mission or aborts it in time to return to its base. For this we propose the use of formal methods. The Event-B method allows us to prove properties on a very abstract model of the system, which is then incrementally refined to a detailed specification of a correct implementation by construction. We also illustrate an approach using graphics specifications using Avatar. These two approaches are illustrated in a very simplified description of our Rover.
The consequences of a disaster are multifaceted, especially with regard to its adverse effects. It is well known that negative effects are intensified when the disaster is unexpected and response measures are not properly prepared, which can result in inestimable consequences, such as loss of human lives. It is known that negative effects are also multiplied when the catastrophe affects critical infrastructures (CIs) such as transportation, health services and energy, among others, as these are complex systems with their own characteristics. This paper presents the path that is being taken towards a more in-depth solution that enables the collection and storage of awareness data, generated through the interaction between command and control agents (decision makers) combined with awareness elements in the communication, coordination and communication of actions to analyze disaster data involving CIs. The idea is that, by analyzing data from disasters in CIs, it is possible to generate insights that, when maintained, will assist future disasters involving CIs. A framework is presented, developed by analyzing several sources of information, from newspapers to government reports, about the biggest disaster in the history of the Petrópolis city, located in the Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The dynamic decision-making (DDM) competence of first level rescue incident commanders have been assessed using Virtual Simulation-based Training (VSBT) and Effective Command (EC) behavioral marking framework for more than seven years in Estonia. VSBT is well studied and a very promising training method for first responders' DDM. Although the EC has been used, there has been no longitudinal study about incident commanders' DDM using VSBT. Therefore, there are no training suggestions provided to organizations that take into account the commanders' individual development paths. We explored how the commanders' DDM competence has changed from 2017 to June 2024. An analysis of 1133 certificates explored performance variations and commander profiles, serving as a foundation for tailoring suggestions for training methods according to the strengths and weaknesses of DDM behaviors. First, we found that incident commanders perform better in the first two levels of situational awareness: perception and comprehension; and planning. The lower scores concern the third phase of situational awareness: prediction, as well as communication, and review behaviors. We identified three groups of commanders: first, the "progressors", are commanders whose overall assessment results have been excellent, or have improved over time. The second group is the "stagnants", whose overall results have remained constant over the different assessments. The final one refers to the "regressors", who are commanders whose competences have decreased over the years. We provide training suggestions that could play a role in the development of DDM behaviors.
This paper introduces an advanced interactive disaster training scenario generation system powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) to address the critical issues in scenario-based disaster training such as the need for expert knowledge, formalization of the scenario and time consumption. By adopting Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and the chatbot-based interface as a Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) enables the generation of customised scenarios for different types of disasters and regional characteristics while ensuring the quality. The feasibility of the proposed method is tested by analysing the generated scenarios and interviewing users. We have confirmed that it is possible to generate scenarios tailored to specific disaster and regional characteristics by referring to actual training scenarios and geographical information, using RAG methods to provide domain knowledge specific to disaster response, which vanilla LLMs do not have. Future enhancements will incorporate dynamic real-time data and detailed user feedback to further optimize system performance and applicability in disaster response training.
This paper examines how to identify Information Flow Bottlenecks during a full-scale Emergency Management (EM) exercise involving a vessel collision off Norway's shore, necessitating collaboration between emergency responders and municipalities. It also investigates factors that amplify or mitigate these. Using surveys, qualitative interviews, and socio-technical network mapping, the paper identifies key barriers and analyse the interplay between Norway's collaborative SAMVIRKE doctrine and the structured Command and Control (C2) approach. It proposes a research model that employs an explorative framework to identify Information Trading Zones (ITZ), categorizing information trading into Enforced, Fractionated, Shared Representation, and Subversive zones. The impact of information exchanges in each zone on the Common Operational Picture (COP) and, consequently, Situational Awareness (SA) is explored, revealing how different information trading dynamics influence crisis response effectiveness. Through findings, the paper offers recommendations for enhancing information flow, balancing SAMVIRKE's collaborative ethos with C2's structure, and potentially improving COP presentation, thus contributing to more effective EM operations.
The threat of CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear) incidents has become a growing concern for military and emergency response organizations, requiring innovative strategies to improve preparedness and mitigate risks. One promising approach is the use of reconnaissance drones - agile unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) - to support CBRN incident response. Reconnaissance drones can quickly provide an overview of CBRN incidents and gather information without risking people. However, the increasing autonomy of drones requires high levels of trust in the technologies used by emergency services. This paper examines attitudes toward autonomous reconnaissance drones among Austrian military personnel, with a specific focus on how different levels of autonomy affect trust and acceptance. As part of the Semi-autonomous chemical aerial reconnaissance system (C-SALS) research project, soldiers and conscripts of the Austrian Armed Forces specializing in CBRN-Defence were surveyed. The results reveal a generally positive perception of drone technology, with speed of results, clear presentation of information, and accuracy rated as the most important characteristics. The study reveals nuanced preferences regarding autonomy levels, with variations between different personnel groups. The findings challenge some common assumptions about technology acceptance and provide important insights for the responsible integration of autonomous reconnaissance drones into CBRN defence preparedness and emergency response planning.
Using volunteers as first responders in frequent emergencies has during the recent decade received increased attention from research and practice. In this study, we focus on the ICT dispatch of volunteer first responders, and their on-site work and collaboration, e.g., as to ICT dispatch, response rates, response times, time-on-site, and tasks performed. We use incident reports filled in by the volunteers and the theoretical lens of digitalized co-production. The results point at a positive effect of using volunteers as first responders, e.g., shortened response times and concrete contributions in most cases, indicating cost-effectiveness. The ICT for dispatch, however, is a challenging part of the co-production, lacking above all, in geofencing, but also in functionality for dynamic resource allocation. Most of the volunteers are willing to contribute to large-scale crisis management, making them a future useful resource in this context. Implications for digitalized co-production are discussed.
As the risk of huge earthquakes and tsunamis increases, the importance of promoting measures centered on community evacuation is growing. While implementing tsunami evacuation, tsunami evacuation simulations are considered effective; however, owing to the challenges in constructing a simulation environment, communities without continued involvement from experts are experiencing a lack of progress in utilizing simulations. Therefore, this study proposes a simple method that enables residents to create community-scale tsunami evacuation simulations to support the consideration and implementation of feasible tsunami evacuation plans. Specifically, this study presents a method in which all the steps required to build a tsunami evacuation simulation, such as creating an evacuation space model, creating an evacuee model, and integrating the results of a tsunami inundation simulation, can be executed in Scratch 3.0, a visual programming environment. The tsunami evacuation simulation prototype demonstrated that the evacuee model adhered to the constructed road network and reached its destination in accordance with the specified evacuation parameters. In the simulation outputs, in the cases of successful evacuation, the IDs and arrival times of successfully evacuated individuals were recorded. In instances of unsuccessful evacuation, the locations and times at which individuals were engulfed by the tsunami were recorded as failures. Through this method, it is expected that local communities can better understand the potential risks and voluntarily implement feasible measures for tsunami evacuation that reflect local needs.
