GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEM AND REMOTE SENSING BASED DISASTER MANAGEMENT AND DECISION SUPPORT PLATFORM: AYDES

Abstract. The accelerated developments in information technology in recent years, increased the amount of usage of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS) in disaster management considerably and the access from mobile and web-based platforms to continuous, accurate and sufficient data needed for decision-making became easier accordingly.
The Disaster Management and Decision Support System (AYDES) has been developed with the purpose of managing the disaster and emergency management processes effectively and creating a management model based on an IT infrastructure and a decision support system required for both pre-disaster risk reduction & preparation and post-disaster respond & recovery stages. The system is a holistic platform integrated with many internal and external systems and services, including desktop, mobile and web-based applications that utilize GIS and RS technologies. AYDES has been prepared especially according to the content of the National Disaster Response Plan of Turkey and designed to be easily used by the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority (AFAD), collaborative Ministries, private institutions and provincial organizations. AYDES is an integrated framework enabling the execution of processes effectively. AYDES already has approximately 6,200 active users from the central and provincial organizations of AFAD and other public institutions and organizations.
AYDES consists of three core components with their sub components, namely "Incident Command System", "Spatial Information System" and "Recovery Information System". Mobile software tools that can deliver real-time information to the web-based core components of AYDES that consists of applications used for mapping during both post-disaster damage detection and pre-disaster risk reduction. Additionally, in case of a need to disaster event inventories, potentially vulnerable assets, hazard – risk data, affected areas of probable or actual disasters, damage detection results and such data and analyses, two software tools have been developed, namely AYDES-RS, a desktop image processing and analysis software and AYDES-CS, a web-based crowdsourcing software tool whereas two of them enable to allow the use of imagery acquired by remote (space/aerial) technologies for various analyses before and after a disaster. AYDES is a software, data and analysis platform that provide accurate and current disaster and emergency data, reports, statistics, job inspections, queries, analyses etc. at every stages before and after the disaster.