Agent-as-a-service-based geospatial service aggregation in the cloud: A case study of flood response

Abstract

An Agent-as-a-Service (AaaS)-based geospatial service aggregation is proposed to build a more efficient, robust and intelligent geospatial service system in the Cloud for flood emergency response. It involves an AaaS infrastructure, encompassing the mechanisms and algorithms for geospatial Web Processing Service (WPS) generation, geoprocessing and aggregation. The method has the following advantages: 1) it allows separately hosted services and data to work together, avoiding transfers of large volumes of spatial data over the network; 2) it enriches geospatial service resources in the distributed environment by utilizing the agent cloning, migration and service regeneration capabilities of the AaaS, solving issues associated with lack of geospatial services to a certain extent; 3) it enables the migration of services to target nodes to finish a task, strengthening decentralization and enhancing the robustness of geospatial service aggregation; and 4) it helps domain experts and authorities solve interdisciplinary emergency issues using various Agent-generated geospatial services.

The TripleSat constellation: a new geospatial data service model

“…From the data provider's point of view, there are two aspects to take into consideration about developing this new system at low cost (Tan, Di, and Deng 2016). Firstly, the new system should have the capability of integrating satellite operations, data receiving, data processing, data dispatch, and other services.…”

“…Moreover, the remote sensing satellites applications market is still typified by a lack of sufficient professional commercial services providers who can meet the needs and various demands from the end-users, like satellite planning, imaging, processing, obtaining, visualization, archiving, etc. Hence, it is clear that commercial remote sensing satellite enterprises who best understand the user demands by having close contact with their customers, provide more direct, convenient, and efficient services (Mantas, Liu, and Pereira 2015;Tan, Di, and Deng 2016). The Twenty First Century Aerospace Technology Co., Ltd. (21AT) is a Beijing based high-tech enterprise and is the first commercial Earth observation satellite operator and service provider in China.…”

Parallel Agent-as-a-Service (P-AaaS) Based Geospatial Service in the Cloud

“…With steps 1 to 5 , the agents will be searched, moved, registered, and transformed into WPS service. For the detailed procedure of Agent migration, see [52]. After migrating to the target cloud node, the agent sends message-passing interface (MPI) geocomputing programs to the shared folder of the master node of the virtual Linux cluster.…”

“…We initially designed the AaaS infrastructure in [52], and according to the designation, the AaaS infrastructure has five basic Web services, including Agent Registration, Agent Clone, Agent Migration, Service Generation, and Agent Life Detection. Users can register agents, conduct Agent migration and generate geospatial services by calling the five services.…”

“…However, in that initial approach, the agent and the cloud-based services communicated in a non-standard manner (e.g., invoking ResultWFS and ResultWCS services to return results), which limited the agent's capabilities and applicability. Hence, we designed an Agent-as-a-Service (AaaS) based method to improve the efficiency, robustness, and to improve the ability for domain experts to collaborate [52]. The AaaS exhibits far better capacity than the traditional SOA based method and has a greater potential to handle disaster responses and environmental risks.…”