Blue Arrow: A Web-Based Spatially-Enabled Decision Support System for Emergency Evacuation Planning

The growing number of crisis situations around the world in recent years has highlighted the urgent need to improve the capability of emergency response systems. When an emergency happens, the most important response is to promptly evacuate victims or potential victims from dangerous areas to safe places. The use of decision support systems can not only improve the efficiency of evacuation but also reduce losses on life and property. But existing computer-based decision support systems mainly aim at simplifying the evacuation process. The evacuation plans produced by them are difficult to follow and emergency response personnel (ERP) cannot readily access emergency evacuation information in real time. In this paper, we present Blue Arrow, a Web-based spatially-enabled decision support system for emergency evacuation planning. Based on their specific requirements, ERP can use the Blue Arrow System to generate various evacuation plans that have intuitive turn-by-turn instructions. These evacuation plans depend not only on the spatial information, but also on the underlying road network information. The Blue Arrow System implements different evacuation plans using the different variants of CCRP algorithm that focus on optimizing various aspects of the evacuation planning process including evacuation time and capacity.