TY - CONF AB - When responding to natural disasters, professional relief units are often supported by many volunteers which are not affiliated to humanitarian organizations. The effective coordination of these volunteers is crucial to leverage their capabilities and to avoid conflicts with professional relief units. In this paper, we empirically identify key requirements that professional relief units pose on this coordination. Based on these requirements, we suggest a decision model. We computationally solve a real-world instance of the model and empirically validate the computed solution in interviews with practitioners. Our results show that the suggested model allows for solving volunteer coordination tasks of realistic size near-optimally within short time, with the determined solution being well accepted by practitioners. We also describe in this article how the suggested decision support model is integrated in the volunteer coordination system which we develop in joint cooperation with a disaster management authority and a software development company. AU - Rauchecker, Gerhard AU - Schryen, Guido ID - 5675 KW - Coordination of spontaneous volunteers KW - volunteer coordination system KW - decision support KW - scheduling optimization model KW - linear programming T2 - Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management TI - Decision Support for the Optimal Coordination of Spontaneous Volunteers in Disaster Relief ER -