Using big data to enhance crisis response and disaster resilience for a smart city

Abstract

High population growth, urbanization, and global climate change drive up the frequency of disasters, causing grave losses of people's lives and property worldwide. Additionally, globalization, technological development, and the changing roles of individuals in society will require entirely new approaches, tools, and capabilities to help inform decision making under uncertain conditions. However, the mismatch between the high disaster vulnerability and the low crisis response and disaster resilience becomes a critical problem for emergency management. Recent years, key advances in computing — smartphones, worldwide mobile internet access, social media and industrial big data have all contributed to break through barriers of information exchange which help disaster managers working on data-driven solutions to disaster management problems. Based on big data, the emergency managers can identify and assesse risk through critical infrastructure operating data or sensor data, and then predict the affected population through smartphone data or social media data, and finally provide an operation plan for establishing the target capabilities for a community to response to the crisis. Also, big data plays a part in providing real-time clues of on-site disaster information through data mining. Based on the analyzed real-time disaster information, the research creates real-time feedback loops on nature disaster to help the decision-makers make the real-time update, precision and dynamic rescue plan. In combination, big data can help in all four phases of disaster management: prevention, protection, mitigation, response, and recovery, and can also help us take actions to improve our city's resilience to disasters.