MCDMEM 2014 - The 4th International Workshop on Multi-Criteria Decision-Making and Emergency Management (MCDMEM 2014)

Various types of incidents and disasters cause huge loss of people’s lives and
property every year and highlight the need to improve our capabilities to handle
natural, health, and manmade emergencies. How to develop efficient emergency
management systems that can provide critical decision support to emergency
management personnel is considered a crucial issue by researchers and practitioners.
Governments, such as the USA, the European Commission, and China, have
recognized the importance of emergency management and funded national level
emergency management projects during the past decade.
Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) refers to the study of methods and
procedures by which concerns about multiple and often competing criteria can be
formally incorporated into the management planning process. Over the years, it has
evolved as an important field of Operations Research (OR), focusing on issues as:
analyzing and evaluating of incompatible criteria and alternatives; modeling decision
makers’ preferences; developing MCDM-based decision support systems; designing
MCDM research paradigm; identifying compromising solutions of multi-criteria
decision making problems.
Today’s emergency management involves heterogeneous types of information that
are stored in different computer systems, platforms, data types, and so on. How to
integrate incident data sources and help decision makers make immediate and
effective responses under pressure and uncertainties is an essential issue that requires
cross-disciplinary collaboration. Recently, researchers and practitioners from OR,
MCDM, computer science, and related fields have made efforts to apply MCDM and
MAUT methods to emergency management. Though various approaches and
technologies have been developed in the MCDM field to handle decision problems
with conflicting criteria in many domains, effective decision support in emergency
management requires in depth analysis of current MCDM methods and techniques,
and adaptation of these techniques specifically for emergency management.
The primary purpose of this workshop is to seek some high-quality papers
presenting current state of the art in using the MCDM methods and techniques for
emergency management from researchers and practitioners from all related disciplines.
All papers will require having some numerical or experimental illustrations. In
particular, the numerical experiments must have a scientific value of its own.
Furthermore, experimental comparisons with other approaches are strongly
encouraged. Topics of interest include (but not limited to) the following:
z Analyzing and evaluating of critical decision elements under different emergency
situations (e.g., earthquake, terrorist attacks, hurricane);
z Modeling different emergency problems using MCDM methods and tools;
z Modeling emergency personnel’ preferences;
z Developing MCDM methods for decision-making process in emergencies;
z Developing MCDM-based hazard planning and emergency management systems;
z Applying the MCDM methods and techniques in developing emergency response
plans or policies;
z Integrating heterogeneous emergency-related data and information;
z Designing emergency information management systems and decision support
systems that provide multiple criteria decision making.
z Emergency Management for natural disaster, man-made public health and
economic/finance security