Higher order Voronoi diagrams for disaster and emergency management

Abstract

In emergency management, (ordered and unordered) k-nearest point queries and k-nearest tessellation (zone) queries are of great importance. GIS or k-nearest graph could answer the former queries, but not for the latter spatial tessellations. This paper introduces an emergency management framework with higher order Voronoi diagrams (order-k Voronoi diagram, ordered order-k Voronoi diagram and k-th nearest Voronoi diagram) providing answers for both point and tessellation queries in various modellings and "what-if" scenarios. We also demonstrate how the complete higher order Voronoi diagrams can be used for mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery phase of emergency management in distributed geoinformatics environments.