Aksit, M., Eren, M. A., Say H. and Yazar, U. T. 'Chapter 5— Key Performance Indicators of Emergency Management Systems’, in Management and Engineering of Critical Infrastructures, 1st ed.; Bedir Tekinerdogan, Mehmet Akşit, Cagatay Catal, William Hurst, Tarek Alskaif, Eds.; by Academic Press: Cambridge, MA, USA, pp. 107-124, 2023
30.09.23
Abstract
Emergency management systems are critical systems which are established to steer the necessary resources for the purpose of minimizing the negative effects of disasters, such as earthquakes.
Disasters which can negatively influence critical infrastructures such as communication, electricity, gas and water networks, roads, bridges, and centers for task forces such as police departments, fire stations, and hospitals, must be handled in a high efficiency. Efficiency in emergency management is also important to restrict the number of casualties. Emergency services are defined as aid services to deal with accidents and urgent problems. Naturally, there may be many possible ways to plan, establish and run emergency services. The location of the logistic centers, the amount of assigned aid workers, the availability of task forces and their equipment, they all influence the efficiency of emergency management. Moreover, there may be several kinds of alternative strategies for prioritizing and compromising the resources.
Most importantly, to decide on the efficiency and effectiveness factors, one need to agree on criteria to qualify, compare, and select the better performing alternatives. In the literature, Key performance Indicator’s (KPIs) are defined as a means of measuring a company's progress towards the desired goals. KPIs are defined for many kinds of businesses and domains. They are generally used as a reference framework in improving the quality of businesses. Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, there are no significant publications on the definition and use of KPIs for emergency management. We consider it essential to define rigorous KPIs so that they can be computed based on the measured and/or simulated parameters of the emergency management centers. The novel contribution of this chapter is twofold. It introduces 14 KPIs and defines them as algebraic specifications. The KPIs are organized in three categories: throughput, time performance, and supply and demand performance. Secondly, an intuitive explanation of a selected set of KPIs is given based on 4 disaster examples and emergency management center configurations.