An Open Urban Emergency Decision Support System

Many contingencies, both natural and man-made, have taught people that well coordination of organizations involved in emergency is most critical for effective response, and decisions ought to be made on the foundation of a synthetical analysis of data from multiple sources. These lessons bring new requirements for emergency Decision Support System (DSS), which include the capability of integrating data from incident-related organizations in real time and performing a comprehensive analysis and model computations. In this paper, we present an open DSS for urban emergency Eplan that is able to satisfy these requirements. The DSS is constructed on the basis of a Digital City Infrastructure Service Platform (CyberSIG) developed by us. Three systems of CyberSIG, spatial database management system, integrated simulation modeling system and CyberSIG service bus, and a decision support subsystem compose the DSS. Under the support of the three underlain systems, data from different organizations can be enrolled into or withdrawn from the DSS easily, and prediction models of incidents are able to be created or replaced quickly and with little difficulty. In fact, the DSS provides an emergency DSS framework capable of response to a variety of urban contingencies. The DSS is firstly introduced, and then questions on the system and the framework are discussed. * Corresponding author.