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For disaster communications, it is very challenging for the contemporary wireless technology and infrastructure to meet the demands for connectivity. Modern wireless networks should be developed to satisfy the increasing demand of quality-of-service (QoS) in mission-critical communications for disaster management which are currently faced with the challenges of limited spectrum, expensive resources, reliable and green communication. There is a tremendous need for optimisation techniques in the study and design of the key functionalities of wireless systems. Until now, almost current optimisation scenarios are often carried out on large timescales (e.g., minutes or hours) without strict time constraints for solving the problems. With the improvement of computational speed, efficient algorithms and advanced coding approaches, a framwork of real-time optimisation programming, which plays a major role in the trend of modern engineering such as mission-critical communications, is introduced for the first time in this paper in the context of natural disaster. In particular, we propose an introduction of embedded convex optimisation programming for unmanned ariel vehicles (UAVs) communications in disaster networks with the strict supervision of executive time in real-time scenarios.

In order to reduce risks for international tourists during and after a disaster, local governments must adopt an integrative, multilingual communication strategy. However, creating effective communication tools and reaching a wide range of tourism sector actors can present financial and collaborative challenges. This research, conducted in the popular tourism destination cities of Kyoto, Japan and Hoi An, Vietnam, sought to identify disaster information perceptions of international tourists and the shortcomings of existing disaster communication strategies in the two cities. Research methods included tourist surveys, assessment workshops, and key informant interviews. Based on analysis of the data using the Laswell Communication Model, the researchers identified exclusion of vital tourism actors such as tour guides and small-scale lodging management from communication networks for Kyoto and a lack of multilingual tools and strategies in Hoi An as issues that could be addressed using existing resources, including local multilingual volunteers.

On September 20, 2017, Maria, the eleventh-most intense Atlantic hurricane ever recorded, made landfall at 6:15 am local time, the second category 5 hurricane to strike the island in as many weeks. What followed was one of the most challenging recovery situations since Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005. Using 402 newspaper articles from The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, I performed a deductive and inductive analysis of print news media frames to demonstrate the complex ways in which the discourse and actions of key social agents and institutions shape disaster risk for the archipelago before, during, and after Maria. Findings suggest media framing facilitated a lack of accountability for key institutions obliged to provide response and recovery. Key powerful actors, including President Donald Trump, shifted blame for the disaster from FEMA and other key institutions to Puerto Rico, effectively protecting the legitimacy of the Trump administration and its response in Puerto Rico. I argue that these processes are owed to economic factors. Here, Beck’s concept of an institutionally dependent “industrial society” is reconstituted in economically vital urban centers. In contrast, the failure of key institutions causes rural spaces to abandon them. This individualization of risk marks what Beck refers to as the emergence into a “risk society.” This article offers important implications for the study of media as a key site for the selective preservation of institutional legitimacy during disasters and the particular and contingent development of a risk society.

Communication channels play a crucial role in times of crisis, especially during disasters. Social media have become substantial means of communication, playing coextensive roles to those of traditional media. Social media present a communication format that can operate not only within areas directly affected by a disaster but also throughout the rest of the world. Twitter has proven to be an important social media platform for providing services and information conveyed by credible organizations in times of crisis when other means of communication become inaccessible. This study focuses on the different uses of Twitter during disasters in Asia and the Pacific in 2014 and 2015. The purpose of this study is to show the pattern of use of Twitter to send warnings and identify crucial needs and responses. This study is based on the premise that Twitter has considerable potential as a communication channel during disasters given its advantages and high compatibility with rapid information dissemination. We gather tweets by scraping https://twitter.com/search-advanced results using the Application Programming Interface of Twitter. The scraping process is conducted with the Python Tweepy library. Data are classified based on a social media framework, geographical area, and user type. We find that the pattern of Twitter users plays a crucial role in raising awareness as well as coordinating relief efforts during disasters. Various types of users utilize Twitter in ways that are consistent with its traditional role. News organizations participate in secondhand reporting, and nongovernment organizations and celebrities are committed to relief coordination. Results cast light on not only how various types of users utilize Twitter in times of disaster but also on how a number of potential Twitter users are absent during disasters. Twitter use for relief coordination occurs understandably in the aftermath of a disaster, but the speed and reach of Twitter make it an ideal platform for disaster preparedness coordination and planning.

Safer homes, stronger communities: a handbook for reconstructing after disasters was developed to assist policy makers and project managers engaged in large-scale post-disaster reconstruction programs make decisions about how to reconstruct housing and communities after natural disasters. As the handbook demonstrates, post-disaster reconstruction begins with a series of decisions that must be made almost immediately. Despite the urgency with which these decisions are made, they have long-term impacts, changing the lives of those affected by the disaster for years to come. As a policy maker, you may be responsible for establishing the policy framework for the entire reconstruction process or for setting reconstruction policy in only one sector. The handbook is emphatic about the importance of establishing a policy to guide reconstruction. Effective reconstruction is set in motion only after the policy maker has evaluated his or her alternatives, conferred with stakeholders, and established the framework and the rules for reconstruction. As international experience and the examples in the handbook clearly demonstrate, reconstruction policy improves both the efficiency and the effectiveness of the reconstruction process. In addition to providing advice on the content of such a policy, the handbook describes mechanisms for managing communications with stakeholders about the policy, for improving the consistency of the policy, and for monitoring the policy's implementation and outcomes.

The role of information and communication technology infrastructure is very crucial and perhaps most important during and post disaster (DPD) scenarios where thousands of lives are at risk. Communication services are expected to operate effectively in such demanding situations with restricted resources while fulfilling their core functionalities. The absence of coordinated cell planning taking the vulnerability of the geographical zone into account is a drawback that inhibits system operations and rescue efforts of public protection and disaster relief (PPDR) units. In this paper, the major issues of cell planning are encountered, and new algorithms for optimum LTE cell planning based on the hybrid dragonfly algorithm with differential evolution (DADE) are proposed under user coverage, user association, and capacity constraints. Thereafter, the feasibility of deployment and operation of an operator-independent emergency system (ES) integrated with balloon-based lightweight LTE eNodeB is analyzed to mitigate the DPD communication challenges. Then evaluate the optimal location for the deployment of ESs to cater to the users under the aforementioned constraint. Finally, optimum cell planning considering the vulnerability of the zone is discussed. The comparative comprehensive analysis of the results shows that the proposed algorithm offers superior convergence characteristics as well as time complexity as compared to the other state-of-the-art algorithms. Comparative results of normalized sum utility depict that the proposed algorithm outperforms the grey wolf optimizer (GWO), salp swarm algorithm (SSA), differential evolution (DE), whale optimization algorithm (WOA), and particle swarm optimization (PSO) based hybrid algorithms, respectively, by 0.5%, 4.3%, 6.5%, 8.6%, and 11.8%.

Social media has become an important channel of communication in emergency and disaster management. Emergency Management Agencies can distribute helpful and important information to the general public and also gather information to enrich their management efforts. This, however, remains challenging since several communication-related barriers occur. This study investigates how the concept of Nudging, a form of behaviour adjustment, can be applied to address these barriers. A Systematic Literature Review and qualitative social media data analysis methods were applied to explore the potential of digital nudges on social media. Twelve forms of digital nudges could be identified in the data that influenced the visibility of the messages they occurred in. The results suggest that Digital Nudging on Social Media is a promising approach to use in emergency and disaster communication.

A vast number of people annually are affected by natural disasters. Children are at risk of losing their lives and suffer mentally or physically after such events. The fostering of resilience and preparedness ahead of disasters can reduce untoward effects of disastrous events. Risk communication and disaster education are considered important aspects of disaster preparedness, but little is known about whether such strategies influence children's behaviour when natural disasters occur or how they cope in the aftermath. This paper presents and discusses various strategies that promote preparedness activities to save lives. To a minor extent, it also includes strategies that can promote coping in the aftermath. Strategies such as informational campaigns, educational activities, psychoeducation and parental guidance are addressed. The literature to date indicates that schools are a suitable arena for risk communication, and that adolescents themselves should be involved and engaged in the communication strategies. However, the relationship between knowledge of preparedness strategies and the resulting preparedness actions is largely unknown. It is unknown whether changes in awareness and attitudes have resulted in actual behaviour change. It is advocated that preparedness activities and parental involvement should supplement information-based strategies.

When communication infrastructure is destroyed by natural disasters, reconstructing a flexible network for search and rescue or restoring transmission channels is a necessary mission. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the system performance for the Internet of Things (IoT) using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the disaster area. The communication protocol is separated into two phases: In the first phase, due to the resource limitation, UAV relays (URs) harvest energy from a ground power beacon (GPB) to support the communication process. In the second phase, the ground base station (GBS) sends the signal to the first UR by using non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique. It is noted that the first UR uses its energy harvested from the first phase to forward the signal to the second UR by applying the decode-and-forward (DF) approach. Similarly, the second UR uses DF to transfer the signal to two IoT sensor node (IoTS) clusters, i.e., near cluster and far cluster. Accordingly, we derive the closed-form expression of the throughput for the IoTSs under imperfect channel state information (CSI) with Nakagami-m fading and formulate a new problem of throughput optimization for multi-UAV system. For optimization problem, solutions are found using covariance matrix adaptive evolutionary strategy (CMA-ES) algorithm. The numerical results show that system performance in terms of throughput can be improved by tuning the UAVs’ altitudes and distances from the GBS to suitable values.