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Creating common operational pictures
for disaster response with collaborative work
T. Chen, G. Su & H. Yuan
Institute of Public Safety Research,
Department of Physics Engineering, Tsinghua University, China
Abstract
People need to understand the kinds of disaster information available from the
multiple participants involved and respond to complex situations in disaster
management. This paper presents a method of constructing common operational
pictures to achieve situation awareness during disaster response among the
emergency response agencies. The method of common operational pictures is
featured with the visualization and collaborative work of current undergoing
response measures and future state prediction provided by computational disaster
models. It was visualized by integrating base map, disaster influence, future state
prediction and resource allocation supported by GIS technologies. The technical
architecture was realized with GIS services and data fusion technologies in a
network centric system.
Keywords: GIS, common operational pictures, disaster response, collaborative
work.
1 Introduction
People have been fighting with all kinds of disasters for centuries. With the fast
development of human society, lifeline systems, transportation systems, various
industrial facilities and concentration of population in cities have tremendously
increased not only vulnerability but also risk of our world.
Disaster management, which covers multiple research areas and involves
various aspects, is a very complex and hot topic to both scientists and
government officers. Recent years, our world suffered several catastrophes
such as China’s May 12th Wenchuan earthquake in 2008 and Japan’s
March 11th earthquake/tsunami in 2011. These disasters have demonstrated the
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doi:10.2495/RISK140331
complexity of disaster management. Managing disasters need collaborative work
of multiple stakeholders and achieve situation awareness. Emergency operations
are mostly carried out by government agencies. When the incident is of
significance and complexity, information should be shared between multiple
agencies and collaborative work is needed.
The Common Operating Pictures (COP) is a military acronym synonymous
first developed by US Army. The aim of COP is to seeing and understanding.
COP [1] is a single identical display of relevant information shared by more than
one command. A common operational picture facilitates collaborative planning
and assists all echelons to achieve situational awareness. In disaster management,
situation awareness (SA) is critical to all involved agencies and decision makers.
In disaster response C2 (Command & Control) system [2], the COP concept is
also of great importance. Modern information technology such as Geographic
Information System (GIS) and Web-based technologies has been used to support
disaster management.
Geospatial information is crucial to decision-making and situation awareness.
It is widely acknowledged that GIS plays a significant role in providing
informational and analytical tools to disaster management [3–5]. It has been
widely used for decision-making, which provides the capability of visualization
of hazard map and spatial expression of resource location as well as command
intentions. In disaster management, GIS based COP must be visualized and
displayed to involved parties that have different roles and responsibilities, such
as planning, field operation, resource allocation and logistics. These parties
should be connected together by a network centric disaster response system.
2 COP needs collaborative work
Disaster response needs collaborative work. Under the situation of significant
disasters, multiple governmental departments are usually involved and take
different responsibilities in response. Vertically, several response levels
including local communities, city government, state government and mobile
command post in the field, will be involved according to the significance of the
incident. Horizontally, several government departments such as police, medical
service, fire and transportation will also be involved according to the discipline
of the disaster. They need to work with each other closely and efficiently. The
question is how to maintain unified situation awareness and command both
vertically and horizontally for all of them (shown in Figure 1). This poses an
important collaboration issue in disaster management.
Disaster management related agencies usually work in distributed places.
Rescue teams and resources are also dispatched to the field of emergency
operations. Disaster and response information should be fused from and share to
the most extensive stakeholders, as well as to the foremost parties. The capability
for different users to access GIS services, base maps, base layers and data from
remote sites is crucial. Only a network centric system can bring them to the
virtual and cyber consultation space wherever they are physically located.
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Disaster response COP offers a comprehensive, map based solution for
disaster response that enables collaboration across organizational boundaries.
COP may facilitate the sharing of the right information with the right people.
The heightened situational awareness provided by the COP will keep everybody
on the same page and synchronized for maximum effect.
The interaction between multiple users comprises textual comments, related
multimedia documents (images, text, videos etc.) and geographic objects
(points, lines, polygons), which can be directly posted into the map. The whole
map view can be made available to other users via a web based work platform,
whereby access can optionally be restricted to user groups or single users.
Figure 1: Collaborative work to create disaster COP.
3 Disaster information fusion, sharing and prediction
Information is the key to disaster response decision making for unified command
and section command. Disaster response needs to collect and share various kinds
of information, both static background data and real-time disaster situation.
Those related information, including the accurate disaster location, the
significance, the impact area, the casualties and the field visual information
should be transferred vertically from the field command post to the off-site
command center. The command center usually has databases support, risk
analysis capabilities, disaster model simulation capabilities and should hold the
whole picture of the situation. On the other hand, involved departments hold
Provincial level
Local level
Medical
Transportation
Fire
Police
Utilities
力量部署
资源调度
救援线路
预警信息
（台风路径）
2008年8月10日11时
中心经度：119.2
中心纬度：24.5
十级风圈：120公里
十二级风圈：55公里
台风路径影响范围内
重点防护目标350个
风险隐患区40个
人口292万人
地区生产总值520281万元
跨层级—国务院、地方
跨地域—福建
跨领域—气象
事件态势
灾民疏散
与安置
City level
Disaster Relief
…… Mobile
Command Post
Horizontal level
Vertical level
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peculiar data and should share their information horizontally to each other. Each
participant department need to provide the information of resource dispatching,
impact prediction, trend analysis, action plans, on-scene video, etc.
Disaster response COP will provide a much needed mapping component and
displays real time operational information and combines it with the traditional
static GIS layers, as shown in Figure 2. First responders, decision makers and
related stakeholders have a much richer set of situational awareness data
available to them so that they can plan and execute responses more timely and
effectively.
Figure 2: Schematic view of COP.
3.1 Data fusion and sharing
In disaster response COP, the following kinds of information should be included:
a. Base map. Through the geo-data management capabilities of GIS, the base
map will include the digital line graph, digital terrain, RS images as well as
residential areas, roads, rivers, lakes, place names;
b. Distribution of public safety related datasets. When disaster strikes, the points
of concern will be searched from the databases and displayed on the base
map. Those include population, public safety resources, civilian resources,
critical infrastructure, as well as other national assets of importance. When
these types of assets are inventoried and accessible through GIS, the
appropriate resources (proximity to an emergency) can be brought in for
timely response;
c. Incident future state prediction by hazard map and hot zones. The affected
areas caused by an incident such as a spatially distributed wind field driving
the dispersion of a toxic gas. This also includes spatially distributed impacts
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and areas of varying vulnerability identified by the risk analysis models. GIS
based visualization module provides the graphic representation of the
geographic maps, model output data and scenario. Their distribution may be
visualized using coordinates of points, lines or areas and their evolution over
time may be visualized using versicolor overlay layers of nephogram on GIS;
d. Updating real-time situation reports on disaster loss such as casualties and
property loss, and resource allocation such as rescue team and relief goods.
These are the basic information used to take corresponding operations and
logistics and should be keep up to date and marked up on map. The spatial
distribution of emergency response teams such as police, medical teams, fire
and urban search and rescue teams should be include in the disaster response
COP;
e. Decision and rescue plans. The intension of an incident action plan can be
drawn on the disaster response COP map, indicating the people evacuation
route, rescue teams’ staging areas and dispatching activities, etc.
f. Other real-time multimedia feedback. The COP should include surveillance
video and photos from on-site command post, airborne cameras and fixed
street cameras.
The above information will be classified and displayed on different map
layers made up before an incident or dynamically generated during the progress
of response operations.
3.2 COP architecture
The architecture of disaster response COP provides a platform for the disaster
response system to interact and collaborate with each other. It is provided with a
group of web services that enable situation awareness through web browsers or
other client based graphic user interfaces.
The architecture of disaster response COP is shown in Figure 3.
Disaster response COP come from technical solutions on GIS and non-GIS
data fusion, which includes the existing data sources and real-time information
came into the system:
(1) By creating a geodatabase model, integrates data exist in multiple disparate
databases to build a common base map, then shares the map via network;
(2) By providing a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) implementation, ingest
other information through Web Services;
(3) By providing collaborative map plotting, instant text message and web video
conversation capability, brings different users at distributed places into a
cyber space and instant sharing information though network;
(4) By creating data exchanging interface, fuses data from disparate data sources
of different departments, then permits re-use of existing data assets;
(5) By developing interfaces to resource tracking system, provide on-demand
linking of location data to resources, such as GPS;
(6) Support OGC and ISO standards, such as Web Map Service (WMS), and
recent Web feed standard.
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Figure 3: Architecture of COP.
3.3 Integrating computational models
Besides the information about what happened, disaster response needs future
state prediction of what would happen. It is very important when response to a
disaster. Here, COP not only hub the information but also provide future state
prediction based on the computational disaster models that are widely used in
disaster evolvement and risk analysis. Usually the command center, one of the
departments or the expertise group has this kind of risk analysis capability to
generate a future state hazard map.
Unlike the battlefield, disaster can be modeled and predicted in many ways
with computational models. In disaster response, disasters are analyzed and
coped with in various aspects, such as disaster evolution analysis, impact on
infrastructures, human behavior and rescue actions. Those aspects are now
supported with many computational models [6, 7]. Programs for automated
forecasts, modeling, warning, risk evaluation and evacuation modeling can be
used for disaster response. These models are developed to explain and image the
disaster mechanism and its impact.
The GIS focuses on visualizing different types of information and offering
spatial analysis capabilities. Moreover, GIS will provide more advanced analysis
functionality such as disaster modeling and simulating capability. Computer
models that simulate disasters require geographic database and topic-oriented
databases. GIS based visualization module provides the graphic representation of
the geographic maps, model output data and scenario.
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4 Conclusion
People need to understand kinds of incident information from multiple
participants involved in and respond to complex situation in disaster
management. GIS based disaster response COP will help to respond quickly to
events with geospatial capabilities for more efficient operations between
involved participants. Disaster response COP will help to enhance situation
awareness in response to significant disasters. It is also featured with the
capability of integrating future state prediction provided by computational
models.
One scenario is to response to a typhoon incident in China, several
departments such as meteorological, water resource, land resource, civil affair,
police, transportation and the city command center will contribute to the disaster
response COP. For example, meteorological bureau will provide the affecting
area using weather data, the route of typhoon, wind speed circle and the rain
forecast onto the COP map. Water resource department will forecast based on
the above information to predict flood or waterlogging. Land resource
department will find out the landslide hazard and mark up on the COP map. The
city command center will find out the influence in the vicinity, population,
critical objects etc. When all the information are fused and shared using disaster
response COP through collaborative work, it will allow for a real-time situational
awareness making emergency and rescue actions much more efficient.
Summarizing, the scope of the disaster response COP concept can be
described as a ubiquitous operation and decision support framework allowing
collaborative work, producing a real-time availability of data such as maps,
datasets, geo-objects, multimedia or comments.
Acknowledgement
Project 71073093 supported by NSFC.
References
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