Design principles of integrated information platform for emergency responses: The case of 2008 Beijing Olympic Games

This paper investigates the challenges faced in designing an integrated information platform for emergency response management and uses the Beijing Olympic Games as a case study. The research methods are grounded in action research, participatory design, and situation-awareness oriented design. The completion of a more than two-year industrial secondment and six-month field studies ensured that a full understanding of user requirements had been obtained. A service-centered architecture was proposed to satisfy these user requirements. The proposed architecture consists mainly of information gathering, database management, and decision support services. The decision support services include situational overview, instant risk assessment, emergency response preplan, and disaster development prediction. Abstracting from the experience obtained while building this system, we outline a set of design principles in the general domain of information systems (IS) development for emergency management. These design principles form a contribution to the information systems literature because they provide guidance to developers who are aiming to support emergency response and the development of such systems that have not yet been adequately met by any existing types of IS. We are proud that the information platform developed was deployed in the real world and used in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. © 2012 INFORMS

Modeling a subway network: A hot-point attraction-driven evolution mechanism

This study proposes a hot-point attraction (HPA)-driven model considering both transfer station attraction and location centrality attraction and accompanies a random walk mechanism in a specified direction to meet the gap of the Barabási-Albert (BA) model in subway network evolution. A comparative analysis between BA model and HPA-driven evolution model is performed via simulation experiment. The results show that the topological characteristics and average probability of access distance obtained by the HPA are more in agreement with the real subway network