THE POTENTIAL USE OF A PUBLIC WEB SERVICE TO GUIDE CONVERGING CONSTRUCTION EQUIPMENT IN US&R

During disaster response, prioritization of limited resources is one of the most important bust challenging tasks. At the same time, it is imperative to timely provide the rescuers with the adequate equipment to facilitate lifesaving operations. However, supply of high demand equipment was insufficient during the initial phase of disaster response, challenging lifesaving operations in the case of the 9-11 terrorist attacks. In respond to the Haiti Earthquake, spatial information of the geographic area was not sufficient to support the search and rescue operations in the early phase of disaster response. However, with the help of civilians, information such as road names, infrastructure damage, and victim locations were updated into the spatial data repository. At the same time, resource outside of the disaster affected zone converges into the area to assist the response efforts, which is the effect of convergence that often made resource coordination challenging in large scale disasters. To efficiently collect information and utilize the converging resources, this paper proposes a flexible data repository for information update for equipment utilization in large scale disaster response scenarios.