On-Demand Post-Disaster Emergency Shelters

In post-disaster emergency shelter aid, various relief agencies and other actors with different backgrounds need to cooperate in a tremendously short amount of time and under very different circumstances. In this article, we describe a research project that develops and tests a new approach in which the demands for shelters in a specific situation are methodically connected with available, innovative and sustainable shelter solutions, a DSS （decision support system）. The DSS is a digital tool that translates the gathered evidence on needs, solutions and location including long-term effects of shelter provision into advice for the provision of sustainable, integral broader shelter solutions and designs. The outcome is a set of characteristics for a DSS for the provision of on-demand emergency shelters. A DSS that meets these characteristics leads to the provision of sustainable shelters that meet the needs of the users and, therefore, have higher performance in long term.