Case studies for data-oriented emergency management/planning in complex urban systems

Abstract

To reduce the losses caused by natural disasters such as hurricanes, it is necessary to build effective and efficient emergency management/planning systems for cities. With increases in volume, variety and acquisition rate of urban data, major opportunities 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, geographical and socio-economic characteristics, and evacuee behavior are collected from various sources. Five related case studies conducted using these unique datasets are summarized 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 complex urban systems. Useful insights are obtained from data for essential tasks of emergency management and planning such as evacuation demand estimation, determination of evacuation zones, evacuation planning and resilience assessment.