EURO 2025 Leeds
Abstract Submission

1206. Optimization of community volunteers’ participation in emergency flood management

Invited abstract in session WA-55: Disaster Response, stream Humanitarian Operations.

Wednesday, 8:30-10:00
Room: Liberty 1.09

Authors (first author is the speaker)

1. Fan Chen
Department of Finance, Anhui Jianzhu University
2. Sander De Leeuw
Wageningen University & Research
3. Dobrila Petrovic
Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University

Abstract

The UK is one of the countries with the highest flood risks and occurrences. 1,258 severe flood events occurred in England between 2015 and 2020, impacting over 300,000 residents. Climate change and urbanization have intensified the challenge of flood management.
Flood management practitioners have increasingly called for collaborative networks and for integration of community volunteers. We are considering real-world flood management in one of county in England. There are regional imbalances in community volunteer participation in emergency which create differences in emergency efficiency.
Recent studies have demonstrated that well-coordinated volunteers’ efforts can considerably reduce response times and improve overall crisis management. However, these studies tend to focus on the qualitative aspects of volunteer involvement.
This research proposes a novel multi-objective optimisation model that integrates community volunteer resources into the emergency management decision-making process. The model determines optimal number of volunteers in different regions. It considers multiple objectives simultaneously including:1) management costs associated with volunteer recruitment, training, and provision of necessary equipment,2) response time reflecting the speed at which volunteers can be deployed to affected areas, taking into account geographical factors and infrastructural constraints and 3) cost incurred when volunteers are transferred to different communities.

Keywords

Status: accepted

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