ICDMS: An Intelligent Cloud Based Disaster Management System for Vehicular Networks

Abstract

The importance of emergency response systems cannot be overemphasized today due to the many manmade and natural disasters in the recent years such as September 2001 and the recent Japan earthquake and tsunami disaster. The overall cost of the Japan disaster alone is estimated to have exceeded 300 billion USD. Transportation and telecommunications play a critical role in disaster response and management in order to minimize loss of human life, economic cost and disruptions. Our research is concerned with developing emergency response systems for disasters of various scales with a focus on transportation systems, which exploit ICT developments.In this paper, we leverage Intelligent Transportation Systems including Vehicular Ad hoc Networks, mobile and Cloud Computing technologies to propose an intelligent disaster management system. The system is intelligent because it is able to gather information from multiple sources and locations, including from the point of incident, and is able to let vehicles make effective strategies and decisions of communication protocols usage. Hybrid vehicular communications based on vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure protocols are opportunistically exploited. The effectiveness of our system is demonstrated through modelling the impact of a disaster on a real city transport environment and comparing it with the case where our disaster management system was in place. We report great benefits derived from the adoption of our proposed system in terms of improved and balanced traffic flow and smooth evacuation.

A smart disaster management system for future cities

“…high performance computing (HPC)), and propagate the information to vehicles and other nodes in real-time. The system proposed in [9] was extended in [10], in that the system model was improved by means of introducing a novel message propagation algorithm through VANETs, and the effectiveness of the system was validated by means of extended simulation results. These earlier works were based on macroscopic traffic modeling.…”

“…The architecture of our proposed smart disaster management system is presented in previous works, [9] and [10]. We briefly revisit the architecture of the proposed system using Figure 1, which is taken from our earlier work.…”

“…The Administrators' Interface provides the highest privilege among the system users and is designed for policy makers and strategists to enable highest level system configuration. For further details, please see [9] and [10].…”

An intelligent disaster management system based evacuation strategies

“…System architecture Our intelligent system architecture of the cloud-enabled vehicular emergency response system is proposed and evaluated in previous works, [4] and [5]. The system consists of three main layers.…”

“…In this paper, from a transportation system perspective, the goal is to investigate the important effect of implementing our proposed disaster management system [4] and [5] including using in-car systems, such as Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), in guiding the evacuating vehicles from a disaster area to one or more safe areas (evacuation areas) outside the city. The road network used in the evacuation is a mixture of urban and highway roads with route choice between these roads.…”