Disaster Prevention and Management

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual foundation and empirical basis for exploring issues related to the design framework for modeling coordination in complex and dynamic enqvironments.

Design/methodology/approach – Previous research suggests that interactions among actors in a complex and dynamic environment tend to be more elastic, offering a higher degree of adaptability. Actions of actors in such an environment need to be coordinated to achieve the desired goal. With that purpose, the authors suggest a social network-based (SN-based) framework to model coordination in complex and dynamic environments.

Findings – The authors successfully applied the proposed SN-based framework to model coordination in the context of soft-target organization and emergency response preparedness.

Originality/value – It is apparent that much work has been done in existing studies on modeling coordination considering the specific domain situation in a complex and dynamic environment. In this paper, the authors propose a unique framework to model coordination in a complex and dynamic environment.