A Simulation Study for Emergency/Disaster Management by Applying Complex Networks Theory

Abstract

Earthquakes, hurricanes, flooding and terrorist attacks pose a severe threat to our society. What’s more, when such adisaster happens, it can spread in a wide range with ubiquitous presence of a large-scale networked system.Therefore, the emergency/disaster management faces new challenges that the decision-makers have extra difficultiesin perceiving the disaster dynamic spreading processes under this networked environment. This study tries to use thecomplex networks theory to tackle this complexity and the result shows the theory is a promising approach to supportdisaster/emergency management by focusing on simulation experiments of small world networks and scale freenetworks. The theory can be used to capture and describe the evolution mechanism, evolution discipline and overallbehavior of a networked system. In particular, the complex networks theory is very strong at analyzing the complexityand dynamical changes of a networked system, which can improve the situation awareness after a disaster hasoccurred and help perceive its dynamic process, which is very important for high-quality decision making. In addition,this study also shows the use of the complex networks theory can build a visualized process to track the dynamicspreading of a disaster in a networked system.