The Role of Blockchain in Disaster Management

Book excerpt: Humans and other living organisms are affected by natural as well as man-made disasters. Most recently, the Covid19 pandemic caused a worldwide healthcare disaster resulting in unprecedented changes in the global economy, the global healthcare system, as well as professional and personal life. The process of recovering from such disasters incurs high costs and time due to the lack of coordination between various relief teams and the inefficient distribution of relief materials such as food, water, and medicine. The prediction or early detection of disasters as well as the prevention of relief fund mismanagement are major concerns for researchers. The Role of Blockchain in Disaster Management explores the latest research in the architecture and implementation of existing blockchain-based IoT frameworks for the detection and prevention of disasters as well as the management of relative supply chains, to protect against mismanagement of essential materials. The distributed nature of Blockchain helps to protect data from internal or external attacks, especially in disaster areas or times of crisis when database systems become overloaded and vulnerable to unauthorized access, manipulation, and disruption of critical services. This book can be used as a reference by graduate students, researchers, professors, and professionals in the fields of computer science, software design, and disaster management. - Presents the design of blockchain-based frameworks for disaster management and their performance evaluation to help compare proposed frameworks - Introduces applications of machine learning techniques to make disaster management systems more intelligent and enable more accurate data analysis/prediction - Addresses data security issues as key examples that can be prevented through the application of blockchain technology