Seminar - Kwan Kim - Exploring Emergency Response coordination through complex adaptive systems

Wednesday 12 November 2008, 1.10 - 1.55 pm
Civil Engineering Lecture Theatre 3

Abstract:

Traditional studies on coordination emphasised more stable and hierarchical environment and therefore is not suitable for explaining the coordination for dynamic and complex environment such as Emergency Response Coordination (ERC). In this study, we draw on coordination theory and network concepts to explore the problem of effective ERC. We argue ERC is dynamic and complex and therefore needs to have the characteristics of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) for it to be effective. We suggest the usefulness of social networks based approach to explore ERC problems and develop a social networks based coordination model for ERC in terms of complex networks. We argue that emergency response coordination is dynamic and complex and therefore needs to have the characteristics of adaptive systems for it to be effective. We apply complex adaptive system theory to explore the coordination process in an emergency situation.

Traditional studies on coordination emphasised more stable and hierachical environment and therefore is not suitable for explaining the coordination for dynamic and complex environment such as emergency response coordination.

Our aim here is to (i) explore and summarise the existing research on coordination theory; (ii) apply the existing coordination theory for dynamic and complex environment; (iii) suggest the usefulness of social networks based approach to explore emergency response coordination problem; (iv) develop a social networks based coordination model for ERC and suggest possible hypothesis for testing the model; (v) explore the emergency response coordination dataset to test the hypothesis; and (vi) apply CAS (complex adaptive systems) theory to further explain the observed behavior.

We ask the following questions: What are the limitations of existing coordination theory for exploring dynamic and complex coordination such as ERC? What is the relationship between social networks and coordination and in particular, how can coordination problem in unstable and dynamic situation can be explored by social networks analysis? How useful is the CAS to explain the emergency response coordination behavior?