34,351 research outputs found
The Role of the Internet of Things in Network Resilience
Disasters lead to devastating structural damage not only to buildings and
transport infrastructure, but also to other critical infrastructure, such as
the power grid and communication backbones. Following such an event, the
availability of minimal communication services is however crucial to allow
efficient and coordinated disaster response, to enable timely public
information, or to provide individuals in need with a default mechanism to post
emergency messages. The Internet of Things consists in the massive deployment
of heterogeneous devices, most of which battery-powered, and interconnected via
wireless network interfaces. Typical IoT communication architectures enables
such IoT devices to not only connect to the communication backbone (i.e. the
Internet) using an infrastructure-based wireless network paradigm, but also to
communicate with one another autonomously, without the help of any
infrastructure, using a spontaneous wireless network paradigm. In this paper,
we argue that the vast deployment of IoT-enabled devices could bring benefits
in terms of data network resilience in face of disaster. Leveraging their
spontaneous wireless networking capabilities, IoT devices could enable minimal
communication services (e.g. emergency micro-message delivery) while the
conventional communication infrastructure is out of service. We identify the
main challenges that must be addressed in order to realize this potential in
practice. These challenges concern various technical aspects, including
physical connectivity requirements, network protocol stack enhancements, data
traffic prioritization schemes, as well as social and political aspects
Improving the resilience of post-disaster water distribution systems using a dynamic optimization framework
The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Improving the resilience of water distribution systems (WDSs) to handle natural disasters (e.g., earthquakes) is a critical step towards sustainable urban water management. This requires the water utility to be able to respond quickly to such disaster events and in an organized manner, to prioritize the use of available resources to restore service rapidly whilst minimizing the negative impacts. Many methods have been developed to evaluate the WDS resilience, but few efforts are made so far to improve resilience of a post-disaster WDS through identifying optimal sequencing of recovery actions. To address this gap, a new dynamic optimization framework is proposed here where the resilience of a post-disaster WDS is evaluated using six different metrics. A tailored Genetic Algorithm is developed to solve the complex optimization problem driven by these metrics. The proposed framework is demonstrated using a real-world WDS with 6,064 pipes. Results obtained show that the proposed framework successfully identifies near-optimal sequencing of recovery actions for this complex WDS. The gained insights, conditional on the specific attributes of the case study, include: (i) the near-optimal sequencing of recovery strategy heavily depends on the damage properties of the WDS, (ii) replacements of damaged elements tend to be scheduled at the intermediate-late stages of the recovery process due to their long operation time, and (iii) interventions to damaged pipe elements near critical facilities (e.g., hospitals) should not be necessarily the first priority to recover due to complex hydraulic interactions within the WDS
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