Crowdsourced Collaborative Decision Making in Crisis Management: Application to Desert Locust Survey and Control

Abstract

Dealing with crisis situations involves significant collaborative decision-making to recover lives and preserve properties. In order to reach timely and appropriate decisions, crisis response organizations need to rapidly obtain an accurate situation awareness of the crisis context. A process by which they need to gather, access, and exchange near real-time information about the events circumstances throughout the entire crisis life cycle. Such activities imply a huge participation of collaborating organizations and goes even beyond their internal borders to reach the entire crisis-stricken community. Recent crisis and disaster situations have demonstrated the crucial role citizens can and must play in responding to such events. The growing development of advanced technologies has open the door for large public to be a key factor in making decisions and conducting guided response actions. We propose in this paper a comprehensive approach that integrates crisis crowdsourcing tasks and techniques to crisis decision-making activities. To demonstrate its relevance, we present a study of crisis scenario based on the context of Desert Locust Plague Survey and Control in the Algerian National Institute of Plant Protection (INPV).