Visual Synthesis of Evolutionary Emergency Scenarios

Abstract

During an emergency situation, decision makers are faced with the problem to quickly analyze large amounts of data related to the involved geographical area in order to grasp a comprehensive overview of the scenario of interest and manage the response activities. The success of those activities heavily depends on the availability of tools which allow them to extract and adequately represent relevant and timely information out of huge sets of (georeferenced) data. During the last 15 years researchers have long strived to define geovisual analytics methods and techniques, which support decision making in time-critical emergency response activities, such as evacuation planning and management. Such methods allow domain experts to visualize the status of the crisis, plan the evacuation and address people towards vacancies in emergency shelters. However, several issues remain to be addressed especially related to the need to make quick decisions in case of emergency scenarios which evolve differently from what one was expecting and from the devised emergency management plan. The research we are carrying out is meant to define an innovative paradigm for human-(geo)information discourse, which could expedite the analysis activities needed to make decisions on crisis management actions. The integrated visual system we describe in the paper allows domain experts, decision makers and any other emergency operator to analyze qualitative data about a geographical area, which may change vigorously with respect to both time and space and whose size represents a critical factor in the efficiency of management activities.