Affiliations: [a]
School of Business, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China
| [b]
College of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China
| [c]
Department of Civil, Environmental and Infrastructure Engineering, George Mason University, US
Correspondence:
[*]
Corresponding author. Xuan-hua Xu, School of Business, Central South University, Changsha, Hunan 410083, China. E-mail: xuxh@csu.edu.cn.
Abstract: During and after an emergency event, multiple organizations with various specialties are involved in consensus decision-making to reduce the loss of lives and property in a timely manner. However, timely, high-consensus decision-making is challenging due to communication barriers between participating organizations. Thus, this study generalizes a conceptual communication network considering communication barriers by reviewing multiple historical emergencies and proposes a quantitative communication network model by integrating an opinion dynamics model and social network analysis (SNA). An illustrative example is provided by simulating two emergency decision-making scenarios to verify the proposed model. A case study of the 2013 Qingdao oil pipeline explosion is presented to demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of the proposed model. The results of the case study indicate that the proposed model can accurately quantify the impact of communication barriers on the opinion formation time. This research provides a quantitative toolkit for understanding and improving decision-making performance in various emergencies.
Keywords: Interorganizational communication network, communication barriers, opinion formation, emergency decision-making
