Enhancing Knowledge Management and Decision-Making Capability of China’s Emergency Operations Center Using Big Data

Emerging communication and computing technologies such as social media, Internet of Things and big data provide great opportunities to improve information management systems for emergency operations. This paper studies the issues of information management at China’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC), and proposes a data-driven knowledge management system (KMS) to support decisionmaking, coordination, and collaboration within EOCs and with the public. In the proposed KMS, big data analytics is employed to gather and analyze information from different knowledge domains and track how a crisis evolves in physical world and in cyber space. The proposed system aims at improving situation awareness of public opinions and regulating human behaviors in regards to an emergency. A case study is presented to explain how the proposed system is applied to improve decision-making during emergency.