Paper 12

Case Studies for Data-Oriented Emergency Management/Planning in Complex Urban Systems

Authors: Kun Xie, Kaan Ozbay, Yuan Zhu, Hong Yang

Volume 27 (2016)

Abstract

To reduce the losses caused by natural disasters such as hurricanes, it is nec-essary to build effective and efficient emergency management/planning systems for cities. With increases in volume, variety and acquisition rate of urban data, major op-portunities exist to implement data-oriented emergency management/planning. New York/New Jersey metropolitan area is selected as the study area. Large datasets related to emergency management/planning including, traffic operations, incidents, geograph-ical and socio-economic characteristics, and evacuee behavior are collected from vari-ous sources. Five related case studies conducted using these unique datasets are sum-marized to present a comprehensive overview on how to use big urban data to obtain innovative solutions for emergency management and planning, in the context of com-plex urban systems. Useful insights are obtained from data for essential tasks of emer-gency management and planning such as evacuation demand estimation, determination of evacuation zones, evacuation planning and resilience assessment.