Volunteer Reputation Evaluation for Emergency Response Operations

Abstract

Natural and man-made disasters are constantly occurring leading to human casualties, infrastructure destruction and financial losses. Volunteers and volunteer organizations play a significant role in each and every phase of disaster management. Therefore, selecting and retaining skilled, motivated and able volunteers becomes important. Existing ICT based solutions focus on resource allocation, team work and other disaster management activities, however none of these systems has addressed the issue of volunteers and their reputation. Reputation of a volunteer based on his personal traits and experience can be used for his selection for an emergency operation. It can also be used as a performance measurement tool during a particular operation. The current work proposes a reputation management system consisting of a Reputation Meta-model and a reputation system architecture for reputation management and measurement.