Decision support for disaster management

Disaster response and recovery are crucial phases of disaster management. Decision-support systems used in disaster management must cope with the complexity and uncertainty involved with the scheduling and assignment of differentially-skilled personnel and assets to specific tasks. Operational constraints-such as workload and labor requirements, precedence constraints, resource availability, and critical deadlines among others-make timely and appropriate task assignment and sequencing difficult. Failure to assign personnel in an efficient and effective manner may result in unnecessary fatalities and significant additional loss of property as well as damaging the reputation of the disaster management organizations. Therefore, this paper proposes a decision-support system for disaster response and recovery using hybrid meta-heuristics.