Generalized Cartographic and Simultaneous Representation of Utility Networks for Decision-Support Systems and Crisis Management in Urban Environments

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Cartographic visualizations of crises are used to create a Common Operational Picture (COP) and enforce Situational Awareness by presenting relevant information to the involved actors. As nearly all crises affect geospatial entities, geo-data representations have to support location-specific analysis throughout the decision-making process. Meaningful cartographic presentation is needed for coordinating the activities of crisis manager in a highly dynamic situation, since operators' attention span and their spatial memories are limiting factors during the perception and interpretation process. Situational Awareness of operators in conjunction with a COP are key aspects in decision-making process and essential for making well thought-out and appropriate decisions. Considering utility networks as one of the most complex and particularly frequent required systems in urban environment, meaningful cartographic presentation of multiple utility networks with respect to disaster management do not exist. Therefore, an optimized visualization of utility infrastructure for emergency response procedures is proposed. The article will describe a conceptual approach on how to simplify, aggregate, and visualize multiple utility networks and their components to meet the requirements of the decision-making process and to support Situational Awareness.

The Assessment of COVID-19 Vulnerability Risk for Crisis Management

“…More detailed analysis shows the use of the GIS environment [36][37][38] with recently developed methodologies to support the decision-making process in crisis management at the local level [29,39] and it is emphasized that its essential part was the visualisation of crisis progress, shown with the use of interactive, realistic, large-scale simulations [40].…”

Making the Invisible Visible—Strategies for Visualizing Underground Infrastructures in Immersive Environments

“…Existing cartographic principles should be adopted to the usage and visualization of underground infrastructure in outdoor environments in immersive ways. While Becker and König [56] already presented first representation strategies for utility network data they are still lacking visualization guidelines for utility networks in immersive environments. The establishment of such new rules will be beneficial for further developers to develop better and more intuitive visualizations and applications.…”