A study of disaster situation management using mobile technology in Yogyakarta

Indonesia is located in a natural disaster prone area. Hence, it is important for the government to establish a disaster management system. Situation management is an important part of disaster management, especially in terms of collection, process, and organization of situation information. This situation information will be used to develop plans for the disaster resolution. This paper discusses the importance of near real time situation information collection, process, and organization in a critical situation, such as a natural disaster. This information is urgently required in order to prepare and disseminate the plans and strategies employed to control the impact of a disaster, including resources allocation. A proposed solution is presented to overcome the problem of the recent existing method of collecting information in a disastrous situation, which is still conducted in paper-based format. Mobile technology like cellular phone is chosen as an end device to deploy the application for collecting information about victims and other matters. Short Messaging Service (SMS) gateway will be used to process information by inputting it to the installed application. SMS gateway technology is chosen because it was suitable for Indonesia as it has broader cellular network communication coverage compared to the mobile Internet coverage. This method is briefly discussed in the context of disaster situation management in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. The advantages and disadvantages of the method are also presented as the result of the feasibility test.