Bee – a tool to help policy and decision makers in understanding risks assessment and mitigation

Disaster risk control and mitigation present both challenges and opportunities.

The critical aspect lies in the scientific research required to formulate policies that anticipate, manage, and alleviate catastrophic events, which increasingly affect human communities with unpredictable and uncontrollable consequences. Conversely, it is crucial to communicate scientific knowledge so that it addresses the needs of communities, policymakers, decision-makers, and practitioners while providing practical solutions. Identifying the most impactful science policy formats is essential for enhancing political discussions. Locating specific information or practical examples pertaining to a particular discipline or field of research can prove to be a daunting task.

An opportunity can come from the diffusion of communication devices that allow policy makers to share such knowledge with citizens establishing a mutual prompt and global communication exchange. Besides a widespread awareness in communities, the social value added is the minimal per-person-investment required to an organisation and no costs charged over the single citizen.
In such a context, we developed Bee, a software framework supporting the entire process for defining, implementing and managing a Risk Management model.

Both methodology and reference standards are globally accepted in the Risk Management area. The original strategic design choice was to make Bee fully customizable with regard to its functionality (through the development team in the pre-deployment process) and user-adjustable (at any time without developer’s intervention and costs) as to type of risks and data managed. Such features make it the tool of choice for diverse areas of application, even in the same organisation: it allows to receive any risk indicators through interfacing any data source, define any types of risk, select the most suitable risk assessment/incident management methodology (CRSA, FMECA/FMEA, RCA, FTA, etc.), assemble risk assessment checklists for any number and type of recipients, choose the most reliable risk scoring algorithm, and select the most effective actions to include in the risk mitigation action plan.

Nowadays such choice results in a strategic tool in the natural anthropogenic events related risk management and communication process, for both policy and decision makers and citizens communities.

On the first side it allows policy and decision makers, and pratictioners to have a easy-to-use tool to implement their knowledge and technologically support their event control policies; it eventually translates data detected by IoT sensors or coming from scientific documentation into evidence (alerts, dashboards, numeric reports and charts) of each risk’s likelihood and impact, suggestions about the actions needed to mitigate each risk, powerful action plan monitoring features.

On the community side, it is the solution for an effective bidirectional communication: policy makers can massively broadcast risk awareness and risk preparedness questionnaires to people over their smartphones; people answers can be processed and released in a risk scoring report; significant events address messages and alerts to all the citizens possibly affected; once the action plan is defined, recovery messages can be broadcasted to citizens, to make their participation to the mitigation process aware, controlled and effective while making the risk communication efforts consistently measurable for the policy makers.