Post War Reconstruction Priorities of Buildings in Gaza Strip Using Decision Support Systems

Abstract

Governments and decision makers are obsessed with well-planned reconstruction after natural disasters and after human caused disasters. Post war reconstruction of damaged buildings must be well managed. The management can be achieved by creating a suitable program fitting with the situation in a stricken country. This issue appears in many societies after disasters, because of the large numbers of affected people and their needs to be satisfied. Another issue appeared when there is a lack of construction machines and equipment and human resources which makes it hard to start working on all destructed houses at the same time. Moreover, siege of Gaza aggravates the problem of reconstruction process, due to the very little amount of allowed materials to be distributed in Gaza Strip and the lack of financial support from donors. The main aim of this study is to establish an effective model for post war reconstruction process by identifying the priorities of housing reconstruction based on a predefined specific criteria and using fuzzy logic model. Reconstruction management is achieved in this study by developing a validated model which would help to distribute reconstruction materials and determining the priority of services and affected people according to specific criteria. The developed model consists of two stages. First, four main criteria were evaluated by a fuzzy logic model. The weights obtained from the first stage are applied in the second stage as inputs to identify the priority degree, subjected to maximum achievable difference between priorities. The developed model has been verified and applied on collected data of totally damaged buildings after 2014 conflict on Gaza. North Governorate’s data was used as a specific case study where results were linked with Geographic Information System. Totally damaged buildings in North Governorate have been graphically shown through linked GIS and categorized into five groups according to emergency level of reconstruction of damaged buildings. All achieved results prove that the proposed model is effective and can be applied to ensure fair distribution of construction materials and financial support for affected people.