INTERFACING EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT WITH GIS- AIDED SPATIAL DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS

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1 INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON MODERN TECHNOLOGIES, EDUCATION AND PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE IN GEODESY AND RELATED FIELDS Sofia, November 2007 INTERFACING EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT WITH GIS- AIDED SPATIAL DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS Turan Erden, and Mehmet Zeki Coskun (TR) ABSTRACT The event of September 11 and major earthquakes in the world have shown the importance of emergency management activities. Emergencies which people faced taught costly lessons. From hurricanes to wildfires, they can be deadly; hovewer, being prepared and good planning may reduce their damages. GIS-aided spatial decision support tools are becoming an important part of the emergency planning and management process today. Developing modern technology to obtain and analyse tremendous amount of data provides decision support for emergency management life cycle (preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery). In this paper, the relations between emergency management and GIS-aided decision support system will be explained. In addition to this, some information will be given about (S)DSS structures, the role of SDSS in emergency management, and applications related to GIS-aided spatial decision support systems. Key words: Emergency Management, Decision Support Systems, Spatial Decision Support Systems, Geographic Information Systems. INTRODUCTİON The event of September 11 and major earthquakes in the world have shown the importance of emergency management activities. Emergencies which people faced taught costly lessons. From hurricanes to wildfires, they can be deadly; hovewer, being prepared and good planning may reduce their damages. One of the specific difficulties in responding to such emergencies is lack of response coordination. The another difficulty is delivery of the goods to incident areas. These difficulties may be overcome by using integrated information and communication systems such as GIS-aided decision support systems. A great number of Decision Support Systems and their derivations (such as SDSS) have been developed and more are now being developed for emergency management operations. These include a broad range of emergency applications such as fire and storm simulations and evacuation planning. Spatial decision support plays an important role in geographic information science since the beginning of the 1990s. Researchers use the spatial decision support in so many different ways and objectives. GIS-aided spatial decision support tools are becoming an important part of the emergency planning and management process today. Developing the modern technology to obtain and analyse 270

2 tremendous amounts of data provides decision support for emergency management life cycle (preparedness, mitigation, response and recovery). In the next section, a brief information will be given about emergency management and GIS. EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AND GIS US National Governor s Association developed an all-hazard or comprehensive emergency management model in the early 1970s. With this approach, emergency management activities divided into four functional classes: mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery (See in Figure 1.). While mitigation and preparedness are pre-disaster activities, response and recovery are considered during and post-disaster activities, respectively. Mitigation deals with disasters to prevent or reduce losses. Preparedness is planning and enhancing responding activities in an emergency. Response begins immediately following an event and examples include mass evacuation, providing medical care, search and rescue, firefighting, containing the hazard, and protecting property and the environment. Recovery continues after the event to restore lifelines (Waugh, 2000). Figure 1. Emergency Management Life Cycle (National Research Council, 2007) Although emergency management has historically focused on urgent aspects of an emergency in response and recovery activities; hovewer, there is a growing interest that emergency management is much more complex and comprehensive than traditionally perceived. Because of the fact that emergency management is a national concern, county emergency management agencies have the responsibility to deal with emergencies. These agencies should develop emergency action plans and be equipped with tools that help them overcome the resources shortfalls. These tools can be used for reaching proper information as well as determine, visualize, and analyse the ranges of emergencies. Such tools can be developed to act as a decision support systems for emergency management agencies via using geographic information systems (GIS) capabilities (Gunes and Kovel, 2000). GIS can be a powerful tool for analysis purposes because each phase in emergency management life cycle is geographically and spatially related to each other. Acoording to Thomas et al. (2002), geotechnologies are at the center of the emergency management life cycle and GIS supports the decision-making process by providing people with a tool for assessing and analysing the geographic nature. After the September 11 Disaster in New York City, geo-technologies were implemented for this reason. 271

3 To make the right decisions, emergency managers need the accurate and quick information about emergencies. They need to have decision support systems for dealing with emergencies in a timely and accurate manner. In the next section, a brief information will be given about Decision Support Systems and Spatial Decision Support Systems. DSS (DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS) AND SDSS (SPATIAL DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS) A Decision Support System is a computer-based system which supports decision maker in organizing information and models to solve problems (Sauter, 1997; Turban, 1990). According to Sauter (1997) DSS technology can be used to help decision makers as follows: Look at more facets of a decision Generate better alternatives Respond to situations quickly Solve complex problems Consider more options for solving a problem Brainstorm solutions Utilize multiple analyses in solving a problem Have new insights into problems and eliminate tunnel vision associated with premature evaluation of options Implement a variety of decision styles and strategies Use more appropriate data Better utilize model and; Consider what-if analyses. From the Densham (1991) point of view, SDSS are explicitly designed to provide the user with a decision-making environment that enables the analysis of geographical information to be carried out in a robust, yet flexible manner and a typical SDSS has four components: analytical tools enabling the user to investigate data; decision models enabling the user to carry out scenario based investigations; a geographic/spatial database providing data for analyses and decision support; a user interface providing easy access to the decision models, database and analytical tools for the user while also providing an attractive and comprehensive display of the output. The main objective of SDSS is to support decision making by employing quantitative approaches with the use of geographic information that is stored within the GIS. In the next section, the role of SDSS in emergency management will be explained. THE ROLE OF SDSS IN EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT A decision maker might use the basic functionality of a GIS to find the optimal route from the fire station to the incident area. For this analysis, the analyst might require the locations of fire stations, road networks, the barrier information, etc. These information could be the main inputs for emergency response decision and GIS could behave as a SDSS in this analysis. Some analysts also want to analyse the existing location of fire stations and want to find the optimal location of them. Some would like to determine the service areas on existing fire stations to help evaluate accessibility. In addition to this, some analysts use service areas to identify how many people, how much property, or anything else that is within the neighborhood. If these types of analyses and 272

4 decisions were frequently made it would be useful to code a macro for making spatial operations easy. Such a system would use a database, spatial models, and suitable interface and might be considered a DSS in terms of traditional definitions (Keenan, 2003). Sometimes, quite complex modeling techniques can be required such as evacuation planning or routing applications and the spatial tools of GIS can assist for these types of analysis. In this case additional modeling software is needed and integrated with GIS. Emergency evacuation is an important example in being integrated with simulation software and GIS (Cova and Church, 1997; Silva and Eglese, 2000). In the next section, some applications related to emergency management and GIS-aided (S)DSS are selected and given brief information about them. SOME APPLICATIONS RELATED TO EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AND GIS-AIDED (S)DSS In the literature there are plenty of GIS-aided (S)DSS applications which consist of broad range incident types from hurricanes to wildfires. In this section, some specific applications have been taken into account and given brief information about them. BASIS (Innovative GIS/Berry and Associates//Spatial Information systems) Emergency management planning tools also play an important role in emergency response. These tools allow evaluation of alternative ways to respond to an emergency. They may be used for estimation of emergency event impact and include capability of emergency impact modeling tools. For instance, an online tool which is developed by Innovative GIS/Berry and Associates//Spatial Information systems (BASIS) can be used for forest fire response planning (Jain and McLean 2003; Innovative GIS 2003). Some questions have been answered using this tool: How far away is the farthest location that can be reached by emergency vehicles? What is the best route to the farthest location? What is the estimated elapsed time at each step along the best route? What portion of the map area is within an 18-minute response time? HURREVAC (HURRicane EVACuation) Another example of GIS-aided (S)DSS is HURREVAC which stands for Hurricane Evacuation and is a restricted-use computer program funded by FEMA and USACE for emergency managers tracking hurricane route and assisting the evacuation decision-making for managers (Sea Island Software Inc, 2007). The real-time data analysis tools allow the managers to make exact decisions based on FEMA Hurricane Evacuation Studies and distributed real-time forecast data. A screen capture of Hurrevac can be seen in Figure

5 Figure 2. Screen Capture of Hurrevac GIERS (GIS-BASED INTELLIGENT EMERGENCY RESPONSE SYSTEMS) Terrorist attacks in World Trade Center show the importance of quick emergency response in urban areas and multi-story buildings, which is resulted in structural damage. With this goal, (Kwan and Lee, 2005) examine the opportunities of using 3-D GIS for the development and implementation of GIS-based Intelligent Emergency Response Systems (GIERS) helping quick emergency response to terrorist attacks on multi-level structures. The system architecture of a GIERS can be seen in Figure 3. Figure 3. System architecture of a GIERS (Kwan and Lee, 2005) CEMPS (CONFIGURABLE EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AND PLANNING SIMULATOR) Another example of GIS-based spatial decision support system is Configurable Emergency Management and Planning Simulator (CEMPS) which is designed for contingency planning in emergency evacuation (See in Figure 4). CEMPS contains four main components as follows (Silva and Eglese, 2000): a generic object oriented evacuation simulation model which consists of the dynamic analysis and decision modelling components, a GIS component which includes the spatial database and geographical analytical tools, an integration link interface which consists of mechanisms developed for dynamic communication and data and information exchange between the GIS and simulator, a user interface which displays the current state of the evacuation process and allows the user to request information or run the simulation. 274

6 Figure 4. Overview of the CEMPS spatial decision support system (Silva and Eglese, 2000) In CEMPS, a traffic simulator and GIS functionality are combining in micro level for achieving dynamic emergency evacuation. ARC/INFO GIS software is used in design, analysis and display the data to support decision making. The particular modules of ARC/INFO which are employed in CEMPS are the map editing (ARC/EDIT), plotting (ARC/PLOT), allocation and routing (NETWORK), and the spatial database management (INFO). The integration between simulator and ARC/GIS is provided with Arc Macro Language (AML) and menu development facility via MENU (Silva and Eglese, 2000). KXSDSSES (KING S CROSS SPATIAL DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR EMERGENCY SERVICES) Similar with CEMPS, KXSDSSES provide the designation of contingency planning before an emergency evacuation rather than real-time emergency management use. According to Castle and Longley, (2005) the objective of study is to create a prototype of KXSDSSES to evaluate and contribute to emergency services to be prepared for a major disaster within the London King s Cross redevelopment. As previously mentioned from Densham (1991), KXSDSSES has four main components which are multi-scalar evacuation model, GIS component, an integration link interface, and a user interface, respectively. When KXSDSSES is completed it will answered the following questions (Castle and Longley, 2005): What quantity of patients with event-related injuries / conditions could be expected from varying degrees of emergency? How will patients with event-related injuries / conditions arrive at onsite medical care delivery? Depending on the type and degree of incident, where should the on-site medical care delivery be located? How many ambulances are required, and where should they be stationed? What mode of alternative transportation (i.e. other than ambulances) might be appropriate for varying incident types / scales (e.g. mini buses, coaches, etc)? What are the shortest / quickest transport routes to non-on-site medical care delivery depending on the type and severity of injuries e.g. burns, toxic inhalation, neurological, etc? What is the estimated time between dispatch and patients arrival at points of non-on-site medical care delivery? A schematic representation of KXSDSSES can be seen in Figure 5. In this structure, the analyst and/or decision-maker interacts with the system via a graphical user interface. 275

7 Figure 5. Schematic Representation of KXSDSSES (Castle, 2006) MORE APPLICATIONS In addition to above developments, there are numerous applications related to emergency management and GIS-aided decision support systems. One example is REMS (Regional Evacuation Management System) which was developed at University of Florida for hurricane evacuation modeling. This system has simulation-based environment based on several network optimization models in estimating the evacuation time and the traffic flow on a given transportation road network. The system consists of the modules which are integration technology, communication, prediction and tracking, emergency planning, GIS, damage assessment, emergency management and control, and coordination (Tufekci, 1995). The another example is Oak Ridge Evacuation Modeling System (OREMS) which is mainly developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) for simulation of traffic flow during an emergency evacuation. Evacuation and shelter models in OREMS are linked to the GIS environment using linked-model approach. The GIS environment in OREMS is used for input and display of data and results as well as building topology and attributing of the transportation network (Franzese and Sorensen, 2004). The another GIS-aided decision support system is RODOS (Real-time On-line DeciOn Support) system which was developed for european countries after Chernobyl accident on 26 April It provides support to decision-makers in the national or regional level. The system is effective before, during, and after an emergency and it can be used in broad range of emergency activities such as sheltering and evacuating people, distribution of goods, agricultural countermeasures, relocation, decontamination, restoration, etc. The current version of the system (RODOS PV6.0) has been installed in national emergency centres of several European countries for operational use, such as Germany, Finland, Spain, Portugal, Austria, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Ukraine, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic. The RODOS uses RoGIS as a geographic information system which is designed as stand-alone software package and includes tools for organising the database and handling various sets of data (RODOS, 2005). In recent years, graduate students are receiving particular attention to develop GIS-aided SDSS. The subject of Yassemi s master thesis is to develop GIS-based spatial decision support system for forest fire management. In his study, he achieved designing and implementation of an integrated GIS-based cellular automata model to characterize forest fire bahavior (Yassemi, 2006). 276

8 In addition to these developments, Real-time Emergency Action Coordination Tool (REACT) which was developed from NVision can be used as a GIS-aided decision support system with various real-time models. It helps first-responders visualize and determine the impact of a disaster as well as helps the decision-makers by monitoring the situation environment and resources available. It can be extended to support lots of types of geographic impact models. REACT also won the 2nd ESRI Special Achievement in GIS Award. Additional information about REACT can be found in Nvision Solutions Inc. website (NVision Inc., 2005). CONCLUSION GIS-aided spatial decision support systems represent an important role in emergency management. Emergency management needs accurate and quick information for dealing with an emergency in a timely and safe manner. Because of the fact that all phases in emergency management are graphically and spatially related to each other, an effective GIS-aided spatial decision support system has a greater role in these activities. In this paper, emergency management activities and their relations to GIS-aided (spatial) decision support systems are taken into consideration. A brief information about (spatial) decision support systems and some recent applications are given in this context. In International Association of Emergency Managers (IAEM) Bulletin 2000, future of emergency management is also explained as follows:...we are seeing the future of emergency management right now. It is a future characterized by rapidly changing information technologies, a growing body of scientific and technical information on current and future hazards, increasing demand for trained and experienced emergency managers, and the development of a global community of emergency management professionals. It is also a future characterized by new and better tools for decision making, increased pressure on emergency management agencies to be innovative and responsive... (IAEM, 2000). In recent years, developing web technologies and distributed GIS techniques led to new approaches in emergency management and related areas. One benefit of distributed GIS is to provide real-time and integrated services for emergency management (Peng and Tsou, 2003). Distributed GIS services and tools can facilitate efficient emergency management in all phases. With the help of technological achievements such as telecommunication networks, GPS, wireless technology and their integration with emergency management can provide efficient information for emergency managers. Different departments, such as police, transportation, and fire, can work together based on real-time geographic information and provide necessary services to the incident areas. And these services can help emergency managers support decision making in timely and accurate manner. In general, all these services can facilitate the public to live in safe and convenient environment. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This paper was carried out with support of The Scientific & Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK). 277

9 REFERENCES Castle, C.J.E., (2006), KXSDSSES: A GIS-Based Spatial Decision Support System for Emergency Services: London s King s Cross Redevelopment, PhD Upgrade Report, Department of Geography University College London. Castle, C.J.E., and Longley, P.A., (2005), A GIS-Based Spatial Decision Support System for Emergency Services: London s King s Cross St. Pancras Underground Station, Geo-Information for Disaster Management, Part 10, pp: , Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Cova, T.J., and Church, R.L. (1997), Modelling Community Evacuation Vulnerability Using GIS, International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 11(8), Densham, P., (1991), Spatial Decision Support Systems, In: Maguire DJ, Goodchild MF and Rhind DW(eds). Geographical Information Systems: Principles and Applications, Vol. 1. Longman: Harlow, pp Franzese, O., and Sorensen, J., (2004) Fast Deployable System for Consequence Management: The Emergency Evacuation Component, ITS Safety and Security Conference, Miami Beach, FL, Gunes, E., and Kovel, J.P., (2000), Using GIS in Emergency Management Operations, Journal of Urban Planning and Development, Vol. 126, No. 3, September, ASCE. Innovative GIS, (2003), Applying MapCalc Map Analysis Software: Mapping Wildfire Response [online]. Available online via [accessed on May 5, 2007]. Jain, S., McLean, C., (2003), A Framework For Modeling And Simulation For Emergency Response, Proceedings of the 2003 Winter Simulation Conference. Keenan, P.B., (2003), Spatial Decision Support Systems, Decision Making Support Systems: Achievements and Challenges for the New Decade, Hershey, Idea Group Publishing, Chapter III, pp: Kwan, M-P., Lee, J., (2005), Emergency Response After 9/11: The Potential of Real-Time 3D GIS For Quick Emergency Response in Micro-Spatial Environments, Computers, Environment And Urban Systems 29 (2005) National Research Council on National Academics, (2007), Succesful Response Starts with a Map: Improving Geospatial Support for Disaster Management, Commitee on Planning for Catastrophe, The National Academies Press, Washington DC, USA. NVision Inc, (2005), Real-time Emergency Action Coordination Tool (REACT) [online], Available online via [Accessed on May 15, 2007]. Peng, Z-R., Tsou, M-H, (2003), Internet GIS: Distributed Geographic Information Services for the Internet and Wireless Networks, John Wiley & Sons Inc. New Jersey, USA. IAEM, (2000), Special Focus Issue: The Future. Expanding the Boundaries of emergency management. IAEM ' 17: 1-24 RODOS, (2005), Real-time On-line DeciOn Support (RODOS) system [online], Available online at Version PV6.0, [accessed on May 15, 2007]. Sauter, V.L., (1997), Decision Support Systems: An Applied Managerial Approach, John Wiley and Sons. Sea Island Software Inc (2007). Hurricane Evacuation [online], Available online via [accessed on May 9, 2007]. Silva, F.N., and Eglese, R.W., (2000), Integrating simulation modelling and GIS: spatial decision support systems for evacuation planning, Journal of the Operational Research Society (2000) 51,

10 Thomas, D.S.K., et all, (2002), Use of Spatial Data and Geographic Technologies in Response to the September 11 Terrorist Attack, Quick Response Report #153, Natural Hazards Research and Applications Information Center University of Colorado. Turban E., (1990), Decision Support and Expert Systems: Management Support Systems, Second Edition, Macmillan Publishing Company, NewYork, USA. Tufekci, S., (1995), An Integrated Emergency Management Decision Support System For Hurricane Emergencies, Safety Science 20 ( 1995) pp: Waugh, W.L., (2000), Living with Hazards Dealing with Disasters: An Introduction to Emergency Management, M.E. Sharpe Inc., NewYork, USA. Yassemi, S., (2006), Development of a GIS-Based Spatial Decision Support System for Forest Fire Management, MSc Thesis, Simon Fraser University, Fall AUTHORS BIOGRAPHY Turan Erden was born in Tekirdağ-Turkey in He graduated from ITU-Geodesy and Photogrammetry Engineering in 1998, then took the MSc degree in He has been working as a research assistant in Surveying Techniques Division in Geodesy and Photogrammetry Engineering Department since He is a PhD candidate now. He is interested in GIS, Emergency Planning and Management, Spatial Decision Support Systems and related subjects. Mehmet Zeki Coşkun was born in Malatya in He graduated from ITU-Geodesy and Photogrammetry Engineering Department, then took his MSc degree in 1992, and took PhD degree in He has been an assistant professor in Surveying Tecniques Division since He is interested in GPS, GIS, Mobile GIS, Emergency Planning, and software development. AUTHORS Turan Erden Research Assistant ITU Geodesy and Photogrammetr Engineering Department Surveying Techniques Division Maslak Istanbul-TURKEY Phone: Fax: erdentur@itu.edu.tr Dr. Mehmet Zeki Coşkun Assistant Professor ITU Geodesy and Photogrammetr Engineering Department Surveying Techniques Division Maslak Istanbul-TURKEY Phone: Fax: coskun@itu.edu.tr 279