Development of Decision Support System for Disaster Management – a Case Study

Natural hazards or any other man-induced hazards will become a serious disaster when they strike the man-made environments causing a huge loss to human life as well as natural resources. In order to manage emergency situations in an effective manner, it is required to define a proper disaster management system. As the disaster management depends on various types of data, information and knowledge on the disasters in the recent past. Therefore, one needs to depend heavily upon various agencies for getting input and implementing the right plan by integrating various kinds of data. This necessity drives various administrators and planners to simulate the emergency response, preparedness, and application of different multi-criterion models for disaster management. Therefore, in the present study, an attempt has been made to develop a ‘Decision Support System’ for ‘Disaster Management’ (DSS-DM) with a specific case study of Kalpakkam Nuclear Power Plant site. DSS-DM has two basic components viz. simulation of the situation based on database and different multi-criteria model. The DSS-DM was developed based upon COTS software macros. As an initiative, using these macros, simulation models related with floods and nuclear disaster were developed. DSS-DM is a menu driven package, which will help decision makers to get the information on the region of interest at a click of point. Simulation process of specific disaster will indicate the possibility of loss that would happen and the emergency requirement for its response. Thus this menu driven package helps the planner or administrator can make an emergency preparedness plan for different disasters with different simulation possibilities in an automated way. * Corresponding author