ABSTRACT
Urbanization is an important factor that increases people’s disaster risk. Concentration of the population in a small area also complicates disaster operations. Well-planned emergency assembly points play an active role in controlling the chaos during and after an incident. Knowledge of how well the emergency assembly points can perform their expected functions is essential from a managerial point of view. This chapter provides a decision analysis framework that aims to provide the decision-maker with managerial insight to guide preparedness, response, and evacuation policies by providing a relative assessment of emergency assembly points. The decision analysis framework, which consists of three stages (digitization, evaluation, and visualization), is flexible enough to easily adapt to different geographies and disaster types. In the first and third stages, geographic information systems were used to produce spatially referenced data and to provide visual control of the results. In the evaluation phase, the combined compromise solution (CoCoSo) method was preferred to ensure that the evaluation results were accepted by all criteria. The assessment and the accompanying extra analyses provide useful information to the decision-maker in determining pre- and post-disaster policies.
