Raster voronoi tessellation and its application to emergency modeling

Due to the advances in Web technologies, various raster maps are available through Web Map Services such as Google maps and Yahoo maps. These online maps are used to visualize diverse types of disasters. Understanding disasters with these online maps has become an important research issue. In this article, we propose a map-based general-purpose emergency management support system based on a computational model of generalized (multiplicatively weighted, order-k, and Minkowski-metric) Voronoi diagrams. The proposed system tessellates Web maps and models disasters (or emergency response units) having different weights in the complete order from 1 to k-1 in the three popular Minkowski metrics (Euclidean, Manhattan, and Maximum distance) provide insightful information for various what-if emergency scenarios. The proposed map-based emergency management support system systematically supports neighboring queries, districting queries, location optimization queries, and routing queries. We provide specific examples to illustrate how our system supports these queries.