| dc.description.abstract | Taiwan is one of the world’s most disaster-prone regions, as indicated in the World Bank’s report entitled “Natural Disaster Hotspots: A Global Risk Analysis.” In fact, every year Taiwan public and private organizations need to work together to prepare various training programs in hope of mitigating disaster impact. Design of an appropriate disaster drill, hence, plays an important role of enhancing the capability of their emergency response units. However, developing a reasonable scenario for the disaster drill is a time-consuming, error-prone task, and experienced drill designers, disaster management officers and/or first responders are required to join the development work. The level of a community’s disaster preparedness and readiness are also highly dependent on whether such work is performed well.
In this research, an earthquake disaster and an area in the city of Taipei were selected for the demonstration of the proposed decision support model and its system, called EDSS (Earthquake Drills Generation and Simulation System). EDSS requires an input data set containing the impact assessments of an earthquake disaster, which can be obtained from Taiwan Earthquake Loss Estimation System (TELES) and are similar to the results of using HAZUS (Hazards in the U.S., a tool created by FEMA and the base version of TELES). EDSS utilizes Unity, a 3D serious game engine, to actually display the events of an earthquake disaster in accordance with the drill script, which is traditionally shown as plain text. In the designated area, real building geometry and simulated earthquake event are rendered inside Unity; hence, after the occurrence of a real earthquake, building damage information can be collected and entered into EDSS for further analysis, in order to show the remaining, disaster-related events not currently discovered by first responders.
In model validation, senior drill designers, disaster management officers and first responders were invited to evaluate the effectiveness of EDSS, and the results show that EDSS has the potential of improving first responders’ awareness of field conditions as well as helps first responders better understand how a disaster evolves over time. | en_US |