Decision Making in Response and Relief Phases Erik van Borkulo 1 , Henk J. Scholten 2 , Sisi Zlatanova 3 and Adri van den Brink 4 1 Integrale Veiligheidskunde, Hogeschool van Utrecht, Heidelberglaan 7, 3508 AJ Utrecht, the Netherlands. Email: erik.vanborkulo@student.hvu.nl 2 SPINlab, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1087, 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Email: hscholten@feweb.vu.nl 3 Section GIS Technology, OTB Research Institute for Housing, Urban and Mobility Studies, TU Delft, P.O. Box 5030, 2600 GA Delft, the Netherlands. Email: s.zlatanova@otb.tudelft.nl 4 Land-use planning group, Wageningen University, Generaal Foulkesweg 13, 6703 BJ, Wageningen, the Netherlands. Email: Adri.vandenBrink@wur.nl 1 Introduction Human beings will never be completely protected from natural, industrial or man-made disasters and accidents, since one can hardly predict when and where the next emergency situation will occur. What the humans can change is the way they respond to disasters. The whole disaster management sector requires urgent developments toward better, more elaborated and appropriate means for facing man- made and natural risks. This is already realised and accepted as a high priority task by many organisa- tions, governments and companies in Europe and all over the world (Cutter et al 2003). Amongst all Response and Relief Phases are the most appealing ones (Zlatanova and Holweg 2004). In these phases disaster and risk management needs to ensure interoperability of emergency services, to provide appropriate information at the right place and in the right moment and to ensure high-quality care for citizens. An extended cooperation is needed across different sectors involved in risk management such as the Health Sector, Police, Fire Brigade, municipality and civil protection, which is beyond their specific services and communications. To fulfil these sophisticated tasks, new knowledge-based systems have to be developed that allow different service units to operate together (and understand each other) in any critical situation (Zlatanova et al 2004). There are some underlying problems that complicate an adequate risk prevention or crisis response: • Lack of good communication between the different actors at different levels; • Lack of information about the ‘information’; • Lack of data standardization; • Lack of up-to-date information about development of the disaster (victims, rescue teams technique, damages, etc.); • Access to existing data and action plans is in general very slow. In the years after 9/11, the attention is increasingly shifting toward cutting-edge technologies based on multi sensor communications (Haala and Böhn, 2003), 3D geospatial information (Kwan and Lee 2005, Lee2004, Zlatanova et al 2005), indoor-positioning (Togt et al 2004) and (3D) visualisation on mobile devices (Kray et al 2003, Rakkolainen and Vainio, 2001). The importance of the standard pro- cedures for communication were recognized by the Open Geospatial Consortium and the Working group on Disaster management became again active. Parallel to developing new technologies and approached for data access and sharing, the process of decision making has to be improved.