Rankings of importance of location-based services utilisation for emergency management

Driven by several issues from earlier commercial public alerting projects, this paper investigates people´s opinions in regard to the current and expected deployments of mobile location-based services under national emergency alerting and warning systems. In particular, the paper examines general public perspective of the importance of utilising the services in different types of emergency events, categorised as natural and human-caused. A survey was carried out to fulfil the requirements of the investigation. The findings clearly denoted significant differences between the mean ranks of all emergency types in the two categories, providing evidence that the importance of utilising LBS is perceived differently by the public for different emergency event types. It is expected that such validated criterion of investigation would help systems´ designers to narrow down their selection of emergency event types to only those with extremely high significance to the public, hence avoiding the possibility of ending up with people opting out from the system as a consequence of being continuously bombarded by notifications for emergency events including minor ones.