Disaster resilient network

During the “great east Japan earthquake” on March 11, 2011, a lot of ICT resources were completely or partially damaged due to the tremor and the resultant tsunami. As a consequence, the demand for ICT services explosively increased, mainly because the people of the affected areas were trying to communicate with the outside world that led to a phenomenal rise in the network traffic. This gave rise to a serious traffic congestion, and the emergency ICT networks and services could not deal with this issue sufficiently.

For disaster exploration and surveillance application, this paper aims to present a novel application of a multi-robot agent based on WSN and to evaluate multi-hop communications supported by robotics used in subterranean tunnel. The paper proposes a Primary-Scout Multi-Robot System (PSMRS) and reports on the implementation of a chain topology in a subterranean environment using a trimmed ZigBee2006 protocol stack to build the multi-hop communication network.

In this paper, interest is in the rapid detection of disaster events such as tsunami, tornadoes, forest fires, and earthquakes. The detection system of disaster events is described and the way to detect a target event from Twitter data is also shown in this paper. The research examines three disasters during the same time period and compares Twitter activity and Internet news on Google. A significant result from this research is that emergency detection could begin using the microblogging service.

This paper proposes a geo spatial information repository for initial condition reporting and updating to guide search and rescue operations and deployment of equipment with safety considerations for the rescuers in large scale disaster response scenarios.

Climate change presents two types of disaster threat in developing countries. One is the potentially devastating impact on vulnerable communities of more frequent and more intense extreme weather events. This contributes to the second threat, the compounding of what are already complex development problems leading to a potential downward development spiral for the world’s poor. Effective disaster response demands rapid access to reliable and accurate data and the capacity to assess, analyse and integrate information from varied sources. ICTs can contribute to improve this.

This module provides government officials and policymakers with an overview of disaster risk management (DRM) and presents an approach for identifying information needs in DRM. It then matches the needs with ICT. The module also describes and provides examples of existing ICT applications for DRM and discusses benefits and barriers for utilizing ICT in DRM.