1123 
AN OPEN URBAN EMERGENCY DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM 
Zimin Zhang*, Qi Li 
Institute of Remote Sensing & Geographical Information System, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China- 
(zhangzimin, liqi)@pku.edu.cn 
Commission IV, WG IV/8 
KEY WORDS: Emergency, Decision Support System, CyberSIG, Integrated Modeling System, CyberSIG Service Bus, Spatial 
Database Management System 
ABSTRACT: 
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enrolled into or withdrawn from the DSS easily, and prediction models of incidents are able to be created or replaced quickly and 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. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
The lessons from the past incidents, for example, the 9.11 
terrorist attacks, the SARS outbreak, the Katrina hurricane, 
have clearly showed the critical importance of coordination of 
multiple organizations involving governmental agencies, the 
private sector and nongovernmental organizations for efficient 
and effective response to emergencies. The coordination 
depends on a series of measures, including well-organized 
response agencies with explicit responsibilities, handy 
communication system to support on-line information 
transmission, and decision support system to assist decision 
makers to issue appropriate response commands and help 
response operators to arrange activities reasonably. Among 
these measures, DSS plays a critical role, and essentially 
demands an integration of data from diverse organizations. 
While presently the DSSs created are almost deficiencies of the 
capability (Wallace and Balogh, 1985; Quaranta et al., 2002), 
or only provide limited integration (Tufekci, 1995; Zerger and 
Smith, 2003; Bianconi et al., 2004; Martin et al., 2004; Alhajraf 
et al., 2005). The reason is the lack of a framework capable of 
providing easy access to resources involving data and models 
widely dispersed in different organizations. 
Digital City Infrastructure Service Platform (CyberSIG) (Lin et 
al., 2002; Li and Gan, 2005) that is developed by us as a 
underpinning system for digital city enables the sharing of 
resources of multiple organizations, and therefore provides a 
well framework described above for emergency DSS. In this 
paper, we present an emergency DSS named Eplan that is 
created based on CyberSIG. The underlain service platform 
brings the DSS to great capability of accommodating to 
response to different kinds of contingencies and diversified 
emergency situation. The architecture and segments of the DSS 
are described in section 2. A discussion on the system and 
relevant questions is given in section 3. 
2. THE OPEN EMERGENCY DSS 
2.1 System overview 
The DSS is composed of a decision support subsystem and 
three systems of CyberSIG, spatial database management 
system (SDMS), CyberSIG service bus (CSB) and integrated 
simulation modeling system (Isim) (see Figure 1). 
CyberSIG 
Spatial Database 
Management 
System 
Decision 
Support I <£r=£j> 
Subsystem 
N 
CyberSIG 
Service Bus 
Integrated 
Simulation 
Modeling System 
Outer information 
Resources 
Figure 1. System architecture overview 
* Corresponding author.