Data processing: financial – business practice – management – or co – Automated electrical financial or business practice or... – Insurance
Reexamination Certificate
1998-04-14
2001-10-09
Rimell, Sau (Department: 2163)
Data processing: financial, business practice, management, or co
Automated electrical financial or business practice or...
Insurance
C705S001100, C701S001000, C701S050000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06301563
ABSTRACT:
FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to a system and method for determining risk exposure for a selected site, and in particular, using adjacency analysis to identify and process other sites that impact the selected site.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The ability to effectively and efficiently use geographical information systems, such as map applications, in combination with informational databases to determine risk exposures and insurance cost estimates, have been hampered by the inability to manage the megabytes of information that are associated with user specified map areas. In typical geographic applications, the information available to the user corresponds to the area being displayed on an end user's terminal. That is, if an underwriter wants to evaluate the risk exposure for a selected site, the terminal must display the entire area that is to be included in the risk evaluation. Therefore, if relatively large areas have to be evaluated, the user must designate the display frame so that it encompasses the entire area. The geographic or mapping application then obtains all of the data corresponding to the framed area and paints the frame. The data corresponding to the selected area is typically sent over a network to the terminal. This data includes among other items, hazardous waste sites, dangerous business operations, schools, hospitals, power sources and gas stations.
A drawback of this approach is that the amount of data being passed through the network for relatively large areas is enormous and will detrimentally affect the network processing speed. For example, some mapping applications use latitude and longitude for reference and designation purposes. In these applications, the system has to handle over 300,000 points to identify only 180 hazard sites. Minimization of data traffic is therefore critical to the efficient use of network resources. Moreover, each time the underwriter changes the risk evaluation criteria, a new set of display information must be sent over the network. The inefficiency of this approach and the resulting traffic congestion on the network is further accentuated in a multiple user environment.
A further disadvantage of displaying the entire evaluation area is that the user may get overwhelmed with the corresponding amount of information. The larger the map frame, the denser the data that the user has to assimilate. As a result, the user loses focus of the immediate area of concern, which is normally smaller than the evaluation area. For example, if a manufacturing plant was worried about the impact of an explosion and fire at the plant, the impact area might be a one mile radius, whereas the risk evaluation area might include a five mile radius. Accordingly, there is a need to provide a system and method that initially limits the display area to the immediate area of concern, performs risk evaluation of sites not immediately visible to the user and thereby minimizes traffic congestion on the network.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
The present invention is a system and method that determines risk exposure for a selected site by using adjacency analysis to identify and process sites that may not be visible to the user. Adjacency is defined as the ability to relate one geographic point with another using mapping applications and visualization tools. Adjacency permits the evaluation of geographic points that are external to the viewable area by analyzing spatial relationships between the selected point and all other points that meet a user designated criteria. As such, all potential impact points are not required to be visible to the user. Importantly, the present invention permits the visible area to be maintained at a user manageable level and additionally, allows evaluation of non-visible sites that may impact the selected site.
In an exemplary embodiment of the present method, a system determines risk exposure for a selected site by using geographical adjacency to evaluate other sites for potential impact. The system geographically stores hazard sites and sensitive receptor sites. Moreover, the system creates and stores a sphere of influence and a sphere of receptivity for each hazard site and sensitive receptor site, respectively. For the selected site, the system calculates a sphere of evaluation based on a geographical location of the selected site and a given radial extent. The system determines if the sphere of influence or the sphere of receptivity intersects the sphere of evaluation and outputs the results of the intersection analysis to a display unit.
Advantageously, the system and method of the present invention evaluate non-displayed sites by retrieving only those sites that result in intersections. This prevents burdening the network by retrieving potentially non-impact points. Moreover, the user does not have to use a trial and error approach to determine the proper display area since the adjacency analysis evaluates all sites that impact a user defined sphere of evaluation. As a result, the present invention alleviates network traffic by virtually eliminating user guesswork. The above factors make the present invention an efficient and accurate means for determining risk exposure for a selected site.
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Brown Randall E.
Marvel Kathleen P.
Spencer Scott R.
Gibbons Del Deo Dolan Griffinger & Vecchione
Jeanty Romain
Rimell Sau
The Chubb Corporation
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