Natural disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis occur all over the world, altering the physical landscape and often severely disrupting people?s daily lives. Recently researchers? attention has focused on using crowds of volunteers to help map the damaged infrastructure and devastation caused by natural disasters.
While such data is extremely useful, as it is allows us to assess damage and thus aid the distribution of relief, it tells us little about how the people in such areas will react to the devastation. In the model developed shown in the Figure below by Crooks and Wise (2013) using MASON and data from several different sources (e.g. OpenStreetMap), they demonstrate how crowdsourced geographic information can be used to study the aftermath of a catastrophic event. The specic case modelled here was the Haiti earthquake of January 2010. The model demonstrates the importance of exploring of human-environment interactions and the positioning of aid centres after a natural disaster and how different aid centre configurations impact the health of the surviving population.
Graphical user interface of the humanitarian relief model. Clockwise from top left: The spatial
environment and its various layers; charts recording agent-deaths, food levels and densities at various aid centres and agent activities; model information.
Model Available at: http://www.css.gmu.edu/haiti/. Alternatively for a more upto date version of the model see: https://github.com/eclab/mason/tree/master/contrib/geomason/sim/app/geo.
Reference:
Crooks, A.T. and Wise, S. (2013), GIS and Agent-Based models for Humanitarian Assistance, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 41: 100-111.
Click on the image below to see a YouTube movie of the model:
