Title: Process Driven Emergency Management Platform for Flood Response Integrating web GIS Technologies

Abstract:Even in highly developed western regions, huge riveraine floods are a great challenge for flood response management. The cooperation of different response authorities and organizations under time critical conditions in a highly dynamic environment require support with modern IT methods and systems. Present Flood Information Systems still do not sufficiently focus on supporting the workflow of planning and carrying out flood response actions. This paper introduces a new process centric approach, which improves the coordination and information workflows of Emergency Operation Centers (EOC) and involved services. Formal process models as core of a process driven emergency management platform provide the responsible agent with appropriate data and analyses along defined emergency processes. The platform guides the EOC officers and involved parties through the organizational steps of flood response actions. Coordinated information flow and automatic multi-channel notifications are ensured throughout the process. The developed approach is successfully validated using flood scenarios with real-world data. The results show that the approach improves information flow in the EOC and to external organizations and enhances coordinated work-sharing of EOC team members during flood response.

Title: Traffic Accidents Trends and Characteristics in Jordan

Abstract:Road traffic accidents are considered among the leading causes of death locally and globally. In Jordan, road traffic accidents were responsible for about 4.5% of fatalities during the year 2007 and were ranked as the third cause of death in the country during the year 2010. Jordan suffers from a serious traffic accidents problem that must get more attention from the decision makers. A total of 1,040,112 accidents have occurred over the study period (1998-2010) with an average of 80,008 accidents/year. Traffic accidents in Jordan were continuously increasing over the study period as a result of continuous increase in population and auto ownership represented by the motorization level (number of registered vehicles/1000 population). This study has utilized the traffic accidents data in Jordan for thirteen years period to mainly investigate their trends and characteristics over that period. Based on the available data, traffic accidents were analyzed considering several variables including accident type, driver age, speed limit, time of the day, day of the week, month of the year, weather condition, pavement surface condition, and severity level.