IASPEI - Picture Gallery

IUGG XXIV General Assembly July 2-13, 2007 Perugia, Italy
(S) - IASPEI - International Association of Seismology and Physics of the Earth's
Interior
JSS003 Oral Presentation 1863
Early warning decision support system based geo-information technology
and spatial planning for earthquakes reduction and assessment in Syria
Mr. Hussain Saleh
Department of Civil Engineering Ghent University IAPSO
Georges Allaert
With the rapid development of economic construction and urbanization in , highly dense population,
infrastructure and traffic, caused a lot of troubles to the main cities. Great change becomes to
integrated management and more to eco-environmental safety construction, especially to the
prevention for disasters destroyed structure as earthquake. It is not possible to completely avoid
earthquakes, but the sufferings can be minimized by creating proper awareness of these disasters and
its impact through developing a suitable early warning system, disaster preparedness and management
of disasters for accelerating the delivery of knowledge and advanced geo-information technology to the
end users. In addition, several factors can help in reducing these impacts such as working directly with
complex urban areas in building capacity, institutional development and information sharing, and
influencing policy. Therefore, a cost effective and feasible disaster information system must depend on
an effective spatial planning in which disaster occurrence is considered explicitly as a prime parameter.
The main innovative aspect of this developed system is the integration of the geographical and
environmental data collection and data management tools with simulation and decision tools for
earthquake reduction and assessment. This system is linked with a large, open, and executable
database which has been created with robust data access and data mining capabilities. This centralized
database, which is available via the internet, is a valuable source of information for policy making such
as earthquake hazards and impacts, transportation, public facilities, emergency services, elevation, land
use/zoning and high resolution imagery. Based on historical earthquake hazard records and
socioeconomic database of Syrian cities, the hazard risk index, the vulnerability index, and the response
ability index can be established, and then the earthquake effect index will be obtained. These
assessment indexes with corresponding digital maps, can be used to measure earthquake risk
management performance and to analyze the spatial features of seismic risk reduction in urban areas.
This system, which is connected to an internet browser for transferring local capability to each client, is
interactive tool that allows decision makers and specialized members to view useful information and
maps for various earthquake scenarios. This will assist city planners and public safety officials to
understand the spatial context in which multiple hazards impact urban environments. Also, this will
support disaster-planning processes, comprehensive disaster risk assessment, reduction, and
management activities. This paper constitutes a crucial step in integrated strategies of earthquake at
complex urban areas by elucidating how artificial intelligence and long-term sustainable spatial planning
could be efficiently introduced in the design process of these strategies to create early warning that can
potentially provide vital information that is quicker, better, and at lower cost for reducing earthquake
damage in . Another innovative direction of this research will show how a novel approach parallelisation
and hybridisation of dynamic optimisation methods coupled with local search procedures can effectively;
simplify handling data, minimize the execution time, and facilitate the design modelling approach based
on simulation and optimisation process. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis using anticipatory process
will be performed in order to handle robustness and simulate an appropriate behaviour of the design
parameters in real-time
Keywords: complexurbanarea, hazardriskindex, spatialplanning