Establishment And Application Of Decision Support System For Emergency Facility Location

With the ever-expanding urban population and increasing global natural disasters, the limited capacity of existing emergency management system is constantly challenged. People want to promote emergency management system in respect of performance and efficiency. The most important factor of emergency management is the first step - emergency facility location, whose scientific rationality is critical to the efficient operation of the whole emergency management system. The shortcut to satisfy people's requirements in emergency service is to provide decision support for emergency facility location with the help of GIS development platform.Belonging to the field of facility location problems, emergency facility location models aim to search for the optimal location of one or multiple emergency facilities under the limit of constraint conditions and the direction of the given objection function. According to search methods and constraint conditions, the paper divides emergency facility location problems into four categories: the classical emergency facility system, the multi-objective emergency facility system, the complementary emergency facility system, and the hierarchy emergency facility system.The classical emergency facility system includes three main types: the Maximal Covering Location Problem (MCLP), P-Center Problem, and Location Set Covering Problem (LSCP). The MCLP pursues the maximal coverage of the fixed number p of emergency facilities under the limit of a given response distance. P-Center Problem seeks the placement of the fixed number p of emergency facilities to minimize the maximal distance between the demand point and its nearest server with no response distance limitation. The LSCP seeks to position the minimum number of servers in such a way that each and every demand point on the network has at least one server initially positioned within some distance or time standard.Based on the three types of models for the classical emergency location, this paper focuses on the following three types emergency location models, responding to the front of the emergency location theory.The Multi-Objective Emergency Facility Problem considers not only the first coverage but also the backup coverage of emergency facilities to demand points, which means when one demand point in a certain server's coverage needs emergency help, other demand points in this coverage can also be protected by another server, in case that another emergency event take place nearly at the same time.The Complementary Emergency Facility Problem aims to find the best location for a new emergency facility (or multiple facilities) when there already exist some facilities in the region, in order to expand the coverage of the emergency system to the largest degree.The Hierarchy Emergency Facility Problem focuses on the situation when the emergency facility system is a hierarchy. For example, small clinics which provide daily treatment and big hospitals which offer high-level treatment comprise the two hierarchies of the medical system. Since servers of different hierarchies provide various services and the factors considered during their placement varies. Therefore, different models should be applied to resolve these problems.Besides the improvement of the above emergency facility location models, this paper utilizes the visual development tools Visual Basic 6.0 as a development platform, and the Geographic Information System secondary development control- MapObjects based on Active X as secondary development tools, to establish the decision support system for emergency facility location, which comprises all the above models. Moreover, this decision support system is applied to several situations corresponding to different models, using real geographic data, and it will be my great pleasure if this paper can support the decision process to some degree in emergency facility location.