CLOTHO: A Large-Scale Internet of Things-Based Crowd Evacuation Planning System for Disaster Management

Abstract

In recent years, different kinds of natural hazards or man-made disasters happened that were diversified and difficult to control with heavy casualties. In this work, we focus on the rapid and systematic evacuation of large-scale densities of people after disasters to reduce loss in an effective manner. The optimal evacuation planning is a key challenge and becomes a hotspot of research and development. We design our system based on an Internet of Things (IoT) scenario that utilizes a mobile Cloud computing platform in order to develop the Crowd Lives Oriented Track and Help Optimizition system (CLOTHO). CLOTHO is an evacuation planning system for large-scale densities of people in disasters. It includes the mobile terminal (IoT side) for data collection and the Cloud backend system for storage and analytics. We build our solution upon a typical IoT/fog disaster management scenario and we propose an IoT application based on an evacuation planning algorithm that uses the Artificial Potential Field (APF), which is the core of CLOTHO. APF is conceptualized as an IoT service, and can determine the direction of evacuation automatically according to the gradient direction of the potential field, suitable for rapid evacuation of large population. People are usually in panic, which easily causes the chaos of evacuation and brings secondary disasters. Based on APF, we propose an evacuation planning algorithm names as Artificial Potential Field with Relationship Attraction (APF-RA). APF-RA guides the evacuees with relationship to move to the same shelter as much as possible, to calm evacuees and realize a more humanitarian evacuation. The experimental results show that CLOTHO (using APF and APF-RA) can effectively improve convergence rate, shorten the evacuation route length and evacuation time, and make the remaining capacity of the surrounding shelters well balanced.

Role of IoT devices in Flood Monitoring System using Social Networking Sites

“…of active users of different age groups on four networking sites ((Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat) vs flood affected locations. We observed that age group (16)(17)(18)(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27)(28)(29)(30) people were active at L2 and at L4, age group (31-45) were more active in social networking sites. From fig.…”

“…discussed the concept of the systematic evacuation of a large group of people. It was called the evacuation planning model for a large group of people during floods [17].…”

Development in building fire detection and evacuation system-a comprehensive review

“…Building Information Modeling (BIM) tools can be used to create a virtual environment for fire emergency evacuation [15], [16]. A rescue operation during fire emergency can be fastened using cloudbased Rescue Worker Interface (RWI) which assists rescue warden by proving real-time information of building fire, the flow of fire, people density, and position of remaining warden [17] [18]. In [19], the author proposed a system which formulates real-time evacuation path based on real-time data acquisition and calculations of risk distributions.…”

Assessing Emergency Shelter Demand Using POI Data and Evacuation Simulation

“…The system can support emergency managers when designing and evaluating more realistic traffic evacuation plans to produce the best evacuation scheme. With the development of emerging technologies, some scholars have begun to focus on intelligent evacuation [40][41][42][43].…”