Leveraging and Fusing Civil and Military Sensors to support Disaster Relief Operations in Smart Environments

Natural disasters occur unpredictably and can range in severity from something locally manageable to large scale events that require external intervention. In particular, when large scale disasters occur, they can cause widespread damage and overwhelm the ability of local governments and authorities to respond. In such situations, Civil-Military Cooperation (CIMIC) is essential for a rapid and robust Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) operation. These type of operations bring to bear the Command and Control (C2) and Logistics capabilities of the military to rapidly deploy assets to help with the disaster relief activities. Smart Cities and Smart Environments, embedded with IoT, introduce multiple sensing modalities that typically provide wide coverage over the deployed area. Given that the military does not own or control these assets, they are sometimes referred to as gray assets, which are not as trustworthy as blue assets, owned by the military. However, leveraging these gray assets can significantly improve the ability for the military to quickly obtain Situational Awareness (SA) about the disaster and optimize the planning of rescue operations and allocation of resources to achieve the best possible effects. Fusing the information from the civilian IoT sensors with the custom military sensors could help validate and improve trust in the information from the gray assets. The focus of this paper is to further examine this challenge of achieving Civil-Military cooperation for HADR operations by leveraging and fusing information from gray and blue assets

Internet of things

Manual of Digital Earth / Editors: Huadong Guo, Michael F. Goodchild, Alessandro Annoni .- Springer, 2020 .- ISBN: 978-981-32-9915-3Digital Earth was born with the aim of replicating the real world within the digital world. Many efforts have been made to observe and sense the Earth, both from space (remote sensing) and by using in situ sensors. Focusing on the latter, advances in Digital Earth have established vital bridges to exploit these sensors and their networks by taking location as a key element. The current era of connectivity envisions that everything is connected to everything. The concept of the Internet of Things(IoT)emergedasaholisticproposaltoenableanecosystemofvaried,heterogeneous networked objects and devices to speak to and interact with each other. To make the IoT ecosystem a reality, it is necessary to understand the electronic components, communication protocols, real-time analysis techniques, and the location of the objects and devices. The IoT ecosystem and the Digital Earth (DE) jointly form interrelated infrastructures for addressing today’s pressing issues and complex challenges. In this chapter, we explore the synergies and frictions in establishing an efficient and permanent collaboration between the two infrastructures, in order to adequately address multidisciplinary and increasingly complex real-world problems. Although there are still some pending issues, the identified synergies generate optimism for a true collaboration between the Internet of Things and the Digital Earth

Mission-Critical Communications from LMR to 5G: a Technology Assessment approach for Smart City scenarios

Radiocommunication networks are one of the main support tools of agencies that carry out actions in Public Protection & Disaster Relief (PPDR), and it is necessary to update these communications technologies from narrowband to broadband and integrated to information technologies to have an effective action before society. Understanding that this problem includes, besides the technical aspects, issues related to the social context to which these systems are inserted, this study aims to construct scenarios, using several sources of information, that helps the managers of the PPDR agencies in the technological decisionmaking process of the Digital Transformation of Mission-Critical Communication considering Smart City scenarios, guided by the methods and approaches of Technological Assessment (TA).As redes de radiocomunicações são uma das principais ferramentas de apoio dos órgãos que realizam ações de Proteção Pública e Socorro em desastres, sendo necessário atualizar essas tecnologias de comunicação de banda estreita para banda larga, e integra- las às tecnologias de informação, para se ter uma atuação efetiva perante a sociedade . Entendendo que esse problema inclui, além dos aspectos técnicos, questões relacionadas ao contexto social ao qual esses sistemas estão inseridos, este estudo tem por objetivo a construção de cenários, utilizando diversas fontes de informação que auxiliem os gestores destas agências na tomada de decisão tecnológica que envolve a transformação digital da Comunicação de Missão Crítica considerando cenários de Cidades Inteligentes, guiado pelos métodos e abordagens de Avaliação Tecnológica (TA)

Leveraging Crowdsourcing and Crowdsensing Data for HADR Operations in a Smart City Environment

The future of the world's population concentration lies within the bounds of urban cities. Citizens, or humans, are the most important tangible resources in a smart city environment, and they need to be served as well as protected. The concept of smart cities is trying to accomplish the idea of serving the citizens by leveraging the potential of information and communications technology assets. Citizens have access to smart technologies and applications, and thus they form an indispensable component to complement and supplement a smart city's operation. Especially in humanitarian assistance and disaster recovery (HADR) operations, where a smart city's core infrastructure might be compromised, the assets of citizens can be put to use. This article aims to describe the current state of affairs for safety in cities and humanitarian assistance in emergency situations, which require leveraging situational awareness data. We discuss and propose mechanisms for connecting to and utilizing crowdsourcing and crowdsensing data in a smart city environment, which can assist in efficient HADR operations

MARGOT: Dynamic IoT Resource Discovery for HADR Environments

Smart City services leverage sophisticated IT architectures whose assets are deployed in dynamic and heterogeneous computing and communication scenarios. Those services are particularly interesting for Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) operations in urban environments, which could improve Situation Awareness by exploiting the Smart City IT infrastructure. To this end, an enabling requirement is the discovery of the available Internet-of-Things (IoT) resources, including sensors, actuators, services, and computing resources, based on a variety of criteria, such as geographical location, proximity, type of device, type of capability, coverage, resource availability, and communication topology / quality of network links. To date, no single standard has emerged that has been widely adopted to solve the discovery challenge. Instead, a variety of different standards have been proposed and cities have either adopted one that is convenient or reinvented a new standard just for themselves. Therefore, enabling discovery across different standards and administrative domains is a fundamental requirement to enable HADR operations in Smart Cities. To address these challenges, we developed MARGOT (Multi-domain Asynchronous Gateway Of Things), a comprehensive solution for resource discovery in Smart City environments that implements a distributed and federated architecture and supports a wide range of discovery protocols

The Role of Collaborative Networks in Sustainability

http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-3-642-15960-2#section=791431&page=1International audienc

A Survey on Multihop Ad Hoc Networks for Disaster Response Scenarios

Disastrous events are one of the most challenging applications of multihop ad hoc networks due to possible damages of existing telecommunication infrastructure.The deployed cellular communication infrastructure might be partially or completely destroyed after a natural disaster. Multihop ad hoc communication is an interesting alternative to deal with the lack of communications in disaster scenarios. They have evolved since their origin, leading to differentad hoc paradigms such as MANETs, VANETs, DTNs, or WSNs.This paper presents a survey on multihop ad hoc network paradigms for disaster scenarios.It highlights their applicability to important tasks in disaster relief operations. More specifically, the paper reviews the main work found in the literature, which employed ad hoc networks in disaster scenarios.In addition, it discusses the open challenges and the future research directions for each different ad hoc paradigm

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio