Flood Emergency Response System Using Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis

Recently, several states in Malaysia have been affected by flood disasters, causing hundred thousands of people to be evacuated from their homes and some of the victims killed on the floods. Therefore, flood emergency response at early stage is very important to keep flood risk and its impact at the very minimum level. However, it is not easy to come up with the best flood emergency response plan. The reason is because flood management problems related to the emergency response are inherently complex, time-bound, involving with conflicting priorities and in need of high decision stakes. So, application of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) is being studied and is used in this project. It can help search and rescue teams to manage those complexity and decisions load by combining value judgments and technical information in a structured MCDA decision framework. This report will discuss the currently research done on the project called Flood Emergency Response System. With a promising results after a few test, it shows that this system is a proven tools that help search and rescue teams to locate and save the flood victims efficiently based on their prioritization of their condition. The objectives of the flood emergency response system is to provide a platform for the rescuers to locate and prioritize which flood victims that they should save first. This system can provide an auto-generated ranking of the current flood victims available in the system for the rescuer to view which place that they should go first in order to save the victims. A brief overview of the system is presented and future research directions of this project are further discussed in this report. In summary, by making the links among flood knowledge, assumptions and choices more explicit by using the application of MCDA, the system is able to increase decision-making effectiveness, efficiency and transparency, which consequently can help the search and rescue teams to saves more lives and reduces flood management costs during the occurrence of flood disaster