Society is faced with a range of contemporary threats to everyday life, from natural and technological hazards to accidents and terrorism. These are embodied within integrated emergency management arrangements that are designed to enhance preparedness and response to such incidents, and in turn facilitate a prompt recovery. Such arrangements must be inherently dynamic and evolve as new threats ...

A major concern in rail industry worldwide is to ensure safety in railway operations in general and at road/rail level crossings in particular where the number of fatal accidents has been significantly increasing over the years. Accidents at level crossings are the result of complex interactions between factors arising from the design and operations of level crossings. An important first step t...

Recent natural disasters indicate that modern technologies for environmental monitoring, modeling, and forecasting are not well integrated with cross-level social responses in many hazard-management systems. This research addresses this problem through a Java-based multi-agent prototype system, GeoAgent-based Knowledge System (GeoAgentKS). This system allows: (1) computer representation of inst...

f the mid-1990s through 2001 two of the West’s most implacable terrorist foes, Abu Hafs al-Masri and Abu Khabab, carried on what appears to have been a long-running feud within al-Qaeda, a feud that came to an end only when Abu Hafs al-Masri was killed by the U.S. military. Abu Hafs joined al-Qaeda early on and served as the group’s military commander from 1996 onward. Abu Khabab was a member o...

This paper investigates the role of management earnings forecasts in mitigating information asymmetry between investors and managers relating to moral hazard, and explains how earnings guidance can facilitate monitoring. I demonstrate that firms that are more susceptible to moral hazard problems and more difficult to monitor are also more likely to issue annual earnings forecasts and they do so...

In the emergency management phase relevant to the occurrence of a catastrophic natural event, the efficiency of the emergency system can be deeply influenced by a correct assignment of the available resources to the “demand” centers, i.e., those elements of the territory that are directly involved in the event. In this paper, a general formulation of the real time optimal resource allocation pr...