Studying And Implementing Emergency Evacuation Systems In Public Crisis Management

In the development of human society, public crises (natural or human-caused) have continued happening without interruption. Especially in recent years, various crisis events have emerged one after another and constantly threatened human security. Hence, governments in different nations have started to pay an increasing attention to this challenging issue, and have started to study how to improve the capabilities of public crisis management. The capacity of public crisis management has become an important tool to measure the ruling ability of modern government. How to use the modern information and network technology to build effective public crisis management information systems to improve the capability of public crisis management is one of the hottest topics on current study of public crisis management.When a crisis occurs, the most urgent task is to evacuate all personnel from dangerous regions to safe areas to protect their lives. Emergency evacuation is a very complex issue, which affected by many external factors, such as road condition, traffic, weather and more. Using computer-based decision support systems in emergency evacuations will not only improve the efficiency of the evacuation operations, but also minimize the damage caused by the crisis. However, the existing decision support systems mainly aimed at simplifying the evacuation process and did not consider many important external factors in real environment. Because of this, evacuation plans produced by these decision support systems are difficult to follow in real situations. In addition, these systems are stand-alone and cannot be accessed easily by various emergency response personnel and decision makers.In this paper, we present Blue Arrow, a web-based spatially-enabled decision support system for emergency evacuation planming. In Blue Arrow system, once the basis information of the crisis event was given, the system will utilize the underlying evacuation algorithms to generate alternative evacuation plans and dynamically presents them on Google Maps. These evacuation plans are generated based on spatial information and underlying road network information, and have detailed turn-by-turn instructions. The Blue Arrow system generates alternative evacuation plans using different variants of CCRP algorithm. These variants focus on optimizing different aspects of the evacuation planning process including evacuation time and capacity. Using the Blue Arrow system, emergency response personnel can not only compare different evacuation plans visually with charts and diagrams, but also see how these evacuation plans might work in practice with the dynamic simulation of evacuation process. In a nut shell, with help of Blue Arrow system, emergency response personnel can construct different evacuation plans beforehand or make real-time evacuation plans when a real crisis occurs. This system will assist decision makers to reach more effective decisions, and in turn to greatly enhance crisis response capabilities.