Title: Great East Japan Earthquake emergency evolution and contingency decision based on system engineering approach

Authors: Yongjian Li; Xunqing Wang; Zhe Li

Addresses: Business School, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China ' Business School, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China ' Business School, Nankai University, Tianjin 300071, China

Abstract: In recent years, unconventional emergencies that have generated widespread concern in the society have frequently occurred. In 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake and the nuclear crisis as a result of this disaster have gained tremendous attention worldwide. The present paper extracted unexpected incident attributes by the approach of multi-case study to describe the Great East Japan Earthquake structurally from the event type, the key attributes, the secondary attributes, the environment attributes and the hazard assessment attributes. On the basis of the structural description, we adopted a system engineering approach, an extended event graph, to describe and analyse this earthquake and its event evolution as well as associated contingency decisions. Some pertinent countermeasures are also presented for reference of similar emergency event evolution in the future.

Keywords: contingency decisions; system engineering; extended event graph; Great East Japan Earthquake; GEJE; unconventional emergencies; earthquakes; emergency events; emergency management; natural disasters; emergency management; disaster operations; resource assignment; chain of events; event evolution; decision making.

DOI: 10.1504/IJITM.2015.068501

International Journal of Information Technology and Management, 2015 Vol.14 No.2/3, pp.146 - 159

Received: 04 May 2013
Accepted: 12 Jan 2014
Published online: 04 Apr 2015 *

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