Using IoT to evacuate during natural disastrous events
Imagine being stuck in a building during an earthquake. How scary and chaotic everything would be. Without access to accurate evacuation information, it can be dangerous for you to self-evacuate. With the technological advances that we have today, you can have access to the evacuation guide at your fingertips by installing software on your phone. The IoT system is often used to assist with daily life tasks, now it can also be used to help people during such extreme circumstances.
Why does having an IoT system will be beneficial for evacuation during natural disaster events? For urban emergencies like fires, first responders can evacuate civilians as soon as possible. However, during natural disaster events, the first responders are also facing the same extreme condition that makes it impossible for first responders to come and help civilians. So, civilians must rely on self-evacuation in order to help themselves to safe areas. The traditional communications methods during natural disastrous events are usually TV, radio broadcast, or siren systems. However, this way of communication only gives civilians general directions and different directions need to be given depending on the situation and location that the civilians are in. Having the IoT system with the software installed can give people personalized instructions and get them to safety.
IoT can be used as a system that helps navigate you to a safe zone and allows you to take part in the process as an information provider. Having a system that can help navigate you to a safe area in real-time and you also can take part in the process of providing information to emergency centers to help more people at risk to safely evacuate. Besides its capabilities to have 2 ways of communication between emergency operators and evacuees, the system also calculates in real-time the safest paths that evacuees can take by taking into consideration surrounding factors. For example, if there are fires that prevent evacuees from reaching the shelters, evacuees can report the situation to the software application and the application can give an updated route that can safely bring the evacuees to the shelter. This feature also updates other users’ routes, which saves so much of their time trying to find the safest routes. Or if a shelter is overcrowded, the evacuees will be routed to another shelter as soon as possible. This prevents a situation where civilians show up to shelters only to find out that the shelters cannot host them and they must go to another one, which can be even more dangerous.
There are four components to this system: emergency operation center, shelters, witness units, and mobile units. The emergency operation center is the core of the decision-making process and the main repository for storing data and information about the process. The managers at the operation center coordinate and send out decisions. Shelters are the locations that would host evacuees. Witness units are access points: they receive information about the challenges that the evacuees are facing, calculate the evacuation routes based on the information given, and send back an updated route to the newest shelter. Mobile units are devices that evacuees use and have software applications that will help them to receive and send information.
The information flow is through a hierarchical order: mobile units to witness units, then witness units to shelters, and shelters to emergency operation centers. This system needs to be reliable during extreme circumstances, the following details are considered during the design of the system. Because the system operates during natural disasters, it needs to use the most reliable network connection for the system to function. The system also needs to consider instances where one of the nodes of the information flow goes down. To prevent the information flow disruption, when the witness units go down, the shelters that are linked to those units will take over the function of those witness units and will notify the emergency operation. When a shelter is overcrowded or not able to host more evacuees, the witness units that are assigned to that shelter need to make sure that evacuees are routed to the next closest shelter. And when the emergency operation goes down, the shelters will need to take over the job and work with the witness units in their assigned areas.
In order to see how effective this system is, the researchers decided to do a simulation in the city of Bahia Blanca in Argentina. Because the city is prone to floods and a center of the petrochemical industry, it is crucial to have a massive evacuation support system in place for its civilians. The researchers simulated 100 witness units at six different points in the city. The witness units are deployed in both residential areas and commercial areas. The researchers also take into consideration the fact that civilians can be at various points in the city and their distances to witness units differ when setting the witness units up. Through the simulation, an estimate of between 3000 and 4000 evacuees can get information about their routes in a matter of seconds. It would take a few minutes for the witness units to reach hundreds of thousands of people in a few minutes.
One crucial factor that needs to be taken into consideration for the system to work is a reliable connection. Emergency operation centers, shelters, and witness units communicate by using LoRa technology. LoRa can cover a wide range of communications and makes sure that as many people as possible can access the evacuation information. And witness units communicate with mobile units of the evacuees by using Wi-Fi. In this paper, they did not mention how they make sure that the connection will be made sure to function properly during such events. I would think that they also need to test the connection source reliability during a natural disaster event so that they can make sure this IoT system will function to its best in case something happens to the connection source.
One concern that I have regarding this system is if this system can be of any use for people who do not use mobile devices or smartphones. One solution that I can think of is they can incorporate traditional broadcasting methods into this system to announce all the directions that are associated with specific locations to make sure that all people can have access to the appropriate information.
As we have discussed in class, I consider this system to be an example of collective computing. This system has all the cloud, crowd, and shroud characteristics. For the cloud component, all the messages and data that are in the system are stored in the cloud. For the crow component, all the events and obstacles that are being reported by evacuees are crowdsourcing. And the shroud element lies in the fact that users can have access to all the information through their smartphones.
The purpose of ubiquitous computing is to assist people and make people’s lives easier. This system not only helps people but also potentially saves their lives from unexpected events, which has me amazed about how far we have come in terms of developing modern technology.
Reference: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-020-01506-z
