A Systems Thinking in Natural Disaster Management: Evacuation Preparedness

• Main Authors: Abu Samah, Khyrina Airin Fariza, Hussin, Burairah, Hasan Basari, Abd Samad
• Format: Article
• Language: English; English
• Published: World Scientific and Engineering Academy and Society (WSEAS) 2012
• Online Access: http://eprints.utem.edu.my/id/eprint/13503/1/EPRI-63.pdf; http://eprints.utem.edu.my/id/eprint/13503/3/EPRI-63.pdf; http://eprints.utem.edu.my/id/eprint/13503/; http://www.wseas.org/
• Institution: Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka

A natural disaster is the effect of the earth's natural hazards, for example, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, heat waves, or landslides. The occurrence has affected the losses of financial, environmental and human life's in recent years. In dealing with this, evacuation is a challenging issue, since the evacuees found difficulties to find the best or optimal evacuation routes especially in the high-rise building. Furthermore, with the complex man made infrastructures and human behavior during the evacuation process, the wayfinding task process getting increasingly difficult. The process becomes critical, especially during an ongoing hazard present in the building. Although there are many researchers contribute in the evacuation methodology, most of it only focus on human’s movement rather than modeling the positive system behavior towards evacuation. This paper presents the systematic modeling of the evacuation preparedness in the building by applying Systems Thinking approaches. The idea is to change the system behavior into a system point of view and study the connection between sub-systems. As a result, this report lays the foundation of systems thinking in two perspectives: human-beings and the preparedness.