Flood Relief Management System for Multi-Agency Disaster Response

Abstract

Flooding places recurrent pressure on disaster-response agencies in Malaysia, where fragmented communication, delayed resource distribution, and limited operational visibility can reduce the effectiveness of relief activities. This study develops and validates a Flood Relief Management System (FRMS) that integrates real-time water-level monitoring with centralized coordination of humanitarian resources and rescue activities. The system combines an ESP32 microcontroller, a non-contact ultrasonic water-level sensor, a local liquid-crystal display and traffic-light alert module with a web dashboard supported by MySQL and Firebase databases. Development followed an Agile, stakeholder-informed process and was validated through user acceptance testing involving 15 stakeholders from government, non-governmental organizations, emergency services, community leadership, and flood-affected groups. Three operational workflows were assessed. Live telemetry and threshold configuration achieved a 100.0% task-completion rate with a median execution time of 4.5 s and a usability rating of 4.8/5. Donation and resource tracking achieved 93.3% completion in 8.2 s with a rating of 4.6/5, while rescue dispatch routing achieved 86.7% completion in 10.5 s with a rating of 4.5/5. Page loading remained below 1.2 s in the tested configuration. The findings indicate that a lightweight, shared digital platform can improve situational visibility and support more coordinated multi-agency flood relief operations.