EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
Year:2018 | Volume:7 | Issue:13|Papers Count:8

Water scarcity has become one of the most vital challenges in most countries around the world. Roughly 0. 5 million residents live in Arak, the capital of Markazi province of Iran. Because of the increasing water demand and recent water shortages due to climate change, more water will be required in the city in the future. Bridging the gap between supply and demand needs powerful management tools. In this study, Arak urban water system has been modeled using a System Dynamics (SD) approach. Employing dynamic modeling and the dynamic system analysis method, the present study was conducted to address the integrated water resources management in Arak region taking advantage of a comprehensive outlook of the water resources system in the region and implementing a behavioral simulation in the Vensim software. The Arak SD model includes water supply sources, demand sources (domestic, irrigation and industry use) and management tools (water price change, wastewater reuse, inter-basin water transfer, and, population reduction). Model simulation for different scenarios investigates the influence of installing conservative fixtures, leak detection and reformation of the water supply network. The model has proven to be useful for Arak’ s urban, and its methodology is applicable to other cities, especially those in arid or semi-arid regions.

Drying of Lake of Urmia will have irrecoverable effects on the environment of the region. In this study, with due attention to the requirements of the problem, first we identify the parameters affecting the drying of Urmia Lake, then we propose a conceptual model of network structure. As the parameters of the conceptual model are interdependent, we use an integrated DEMATEL and Fuzzy Analytic Network Process technique in order to assess the impacts and impressionability of those parameters as well as relative importance weights and ranking thereof. The results indicated that among main criteria, "management aspect" had the greatest impact and the maximum importance weight. Also among sub-criteria, "lack of strategic plan about the preservation of lake in the past years and updating it" ranked as first in terms of intensity of impacts. Moreover, "Lack of attention to the environment among managers and focusing on short-term goals" acquired the maximum importance weight. According to the results, it seems necessary for the managers to switch from mere economical attitude, towards environmental protective and preservative attitude.

One of the most important factors affecting the rate of damages and casualties during natural disasters is the existence of an effective crisis management system in which the volunteers are recognized as the main factor. In the present research, a multi-objective model has been introduced for allocating volunteers with different skills and different levels thereof to humanitarian affairs. The objectives of the model are to minimize total unfulfilled demands as well as increasing volunteers’ job satisfaction. Specifically, in this article the crisis zone has been divided into smaller groups; then the volunteers with different skills of different levels were allocated to them depending on each zone needs; in a way, that total degree of volunteers’ abilities in each group is more than the threshold specified by the decision-makers. Finally, the introduced model was solved by an LP-metric method and in order to assess the behavior of the model, a sensitivity analysis has been carried out on various parameters. The results show that volunteers must be assigned to affairs related to their skills, but to the extent that the total of unmet demands does not increase more than usual.

Nowadays, natural disasters are among the most crucial issues in many cities all around the world. Iran, due to its geographical location, historically has always been encountering natural disasters, especially earthquakes. This fact reveals the necessity of using disaster management procedures to reduce the damages caused by earthquakes. In this regard, investigating the role and status of operational preparedness as the most important phase of the disaster management cycle across four regions in Kerman is the goal of this study. This research is of the descriptive-analytic method and of survey type. The required data have been collected at the household level by the use of library and field studies through questionnaire distribution. The statistical population is comprised of precisely 141867 resident households of Kerman and therefore the sample size has been estimated to be 350 households according to Cochran formula. The sampling method is cluster sampling proportional to sample size. Finally, after data collection, the data have been analyzed using SPSS and one-way ANOVA, Tukey tests and Pearson correlation. The results of this research show that preparedness is the most important phase before disasters occurrence that in this regard there are differences among four regions in Kerman, so that region 2 with an average of 52. 52 has the highest and region 4 with an average of 46. 64 has the least operational preparedness. Also, the socio-economic status of households with a significant level of 0. 002 and the weighting factor of 0. 167** is correlated with their operational preparedness level, showing that as households′ socio-economic condition improves, so will their operational preparedness level in facing earthquakes.

Annually 70000 people are being killed all around the world and around 200 million encounter natural and humanmade disasters. Thus crisis management and especially the effective management of relief logistic activities and evacuation of the injured from incident areas seems vital. Some important activities when a disaster occurs include relief logistic activities and delivering these items to the injured people and moving them to medical centers. Military forces due to their potential and intrinsic capabilities as an aiding force play a key role in disaster response activities. In recent years the role of armed forces in response to crises has increased due to: the growth in the frequency and scale of natural disasters, increasing interest of the armed forces to take part in crises response, increasing tendency of humanitarian responses towards the militarization. In this paper a two-stage approach is used to optimize the transferring of relief goods to incident areas and evacuating the injured people therefrom, considering the role of armed forces. First, a numerical model is developed in which vehicles are accounted for by integer rather than binary variable. This model is used to determine the number of goods and transferred people. Then by using a linear equations system, the exact instruction for vehicles is determined. In the proposed model the degree of injury of victims and the possibility of their survival is considered. Also in mixed integer model, the location of temporary medical centers and Local Distribution Centers (LDCs) near the incident areas are determined. Armed forces available facilities, including personnel and vehicles that can be effective in relief logistics, are considered. The ultimate objective function tries to maximize the number of survivors. The proposed optimization approach is applied to East Azarbaijan earthquake in 2012, however, it is capable of being applied to any other similar situation.

The success in crisis management is reached when organizations consider preparedness as well as prevention. This necessitates the organizations to adopt enhanced management principles, specifically project management principles. It is well known that the implementation of preventive programs and projects of crisis management are among the most vital measures to reduce crisis occurrence and its consequences. However, on the other hand, resources of organizations and responsible authorities are limited and rational management seeks maximum exploitation of these limited resources to counteract crisis. In this paper, the aim is feasibility study and optimization of programs and projects of crisis management is such a way that not only allocated resources are sufficient, but also the goals of crisis management are met satisfactorily. To this end, the optimization approach based on mathematical programming is used. Two optimization models of crisis management including (1) optimization of a combination of crisis management projects and (2) optimization of scheduling of crisis management projects are proposed. The first model seeks selection of the best combination of crisis management projects from a list of potential projects. While the second model suggests the best schedule of projects implementation. Both models act in such a way that constraints on required resources and the logical relationship among projects are met, and moreover, the cost of projects are minimized and goals of crisis management are reached. These models, as a consulting system, help managers to adopt the best decision concerning crisis projects. Furthermore, the suggested models are executed on a case study and the results are analyzed.

Planning of useful and sustainable strategies is one of the most important goals of organizations to defend critical systems. In this research, a modeling is considered for investment optimization of defense and attack in complex with interdependent subsystems, in which failure of a subsystem will possibly affect the optimal performance of other subsystems. In this study, a static model is proposed that according to the probabilities of a successful attack, subsystems dependency ratio, different modes of operation of the system, reliability structure and game theory approach in determining balancing point, presents a nonlinear planning model to determine the amount of investment in defending and attacking of all subsystems. Then, according to the results obtained from the proposed static model, the dynamics of the system and the concepts of evolutionary game theory, a new and dynamic method is introduced to determine the stable strategies for defense and attack. According to the proposed model, the evolutionarily stable strategy will be examined over time, from the perspective of a defender, attacker, and the whole system. Finally, the proposed model is applied to a numerical example and its results are analyzed.

Iran as one of the outstanding countries regarding disaster occurrences is experiencing, on average, one earthquake of above 3 Richters every week. Earthquake is a natural disaster, however, due to its various social consequences, has become a subject of sociology and has created vulnerable groups, one of those groups being women. The aim of this study is to evaluate women’ s social vulnerability following the earthquakes. This research includes both qualitative and quantitative methods. Qualitative method is used to identify the social damages to women experiencing earthquakes and collecting categories through focus groups. In the quantitative phase, 90 women who have experienced Varzaghan and Ahar earthquakes are compared to another peer group of 90 persons who have not experienced the earthquake, in order to examine the variables. The results showed that women are one of the most dama, get society groups, not only having the highest rate of mortality but also are victims of many social problems such as social insecurity, mistrust toward society and social alienation.