Intelligent evacuation management systems: A review

Crowd and evacuation management have been active areas of research and study in the recent past. Various developments continue to take place in the process of efficient evacuation of crowds in mass gatherings. This article is intended to provide a review of intelligent evacuation management systems covering the aspects of crowd monitoring, crowd disaster prediction, evacuation modelling, and evacuation path guidelines. Soft computing approaches play a vital role in the design and deployment of intelligent evacuation applications pertaining to crowd control management. While the review deals with video and nonvideo based aspects of crowd monitoring and crowd disaster prediction, evacuation techniques are reviewed via the theme of soft computing, along with a brief review on the evacuation navigation path. We believe that this review will assist researchers in developing reliable automated evacuation systems that will help in ensuring the safety of the evacuees especially during emergency evacuation scenarios

Enabling smart city resilience: Post-disaster response and structural health monitoring

The concept of Smart Cities has been introduced to categorize a vast area of activities to enhance the quality of life of citizens. A central feature of these activities is the pervasive use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), helping cities to make better use of limited resources. Indeed, the ASCE Vision for Civil Engineering in 2025 (ASCE 2007) portends a future in which engineers will rely on and leverage real-time access to a living database, sensors, diagnostic tools, and other advanced technologies to ensure that informed decisions are made. However, these advances in technology take place against a backdrop of the deterioration of infrastructure, in addition to natural and human-made disasters. Moreover, recent events constantly remind us of the tremendous devastation that natural and human-made disasters can wreak on society. As such, emergency response procedures and resilience are among the crucial dimensions of any Smart City plan. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has recently launched plans to invest $50 million to develop cutting-edge emergency response technologies for Smart Cities. Furthermore, after significant disasters have taken place, it is imperative that emergency facilities and evacuation routes, including bridges and highways, be assessed for safety. The objective of this research is to provide a new framework that uses commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices such as smartphones, digital cameras, and unmanned aerial vehicles to enhance the functionality of Smart Cities, especially with respect to emergency response and civil infrastructure monitoring/assessment. To achieve this objective, this research focuses on post-disaster victim localization and assessment, first responder tracking and event localization, and vision-based structural monitoring/assessment, including the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This research constitutes a significant step toward the realization of Smart City Resilience.National Science Foundation Grant No. 1030454Association of American RailroadsOpe

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

WLAN-paikannuksen elinkaaren tukeminen

The advent of GPS positioning at the turn of the millennium provided consumers with worldwide access to outdoor location information. For the purposes of indoor positioning, however, the GPS signal rarely penetrates buildings well enough to maintain the same level of positioning granularity as outdoors. Arriving around the same time, wireless local area networks (WLAN) have gained widespread support both in terms of infrastructure deployments and client proliferation. A promising approach to bridge the location context then has been positioning based on WLAN signals. In addition to being readily available in most environments needing support for location information, the adoption of a WLAN positioning system is financially low-cost compared to dedicated infrastructure approaches, partly due to operating on an unlicensed frequency band. Furthermore, the accuracy provided by this approach is enough for a wide range of location-based services, such as navigation and location-aware advertisements. In spite of this attractive proposition and extensive research in both academia and industry, WLAN positioning has yet to become the de facto choice for indoor positioning. This is despite over 20 000 publications and the foundation of several companies. The main reasons for this include: (i) the cost of deployment, and re-deployment, which is often significant, if not prohibitive, in terms of work hours; (ii) the complex propagation of the wireless signal, which -- through interaction with the environment -- renders it inherently stochastic; (iii) the use of an unlicensed frequency band, which means the wireless medium faces fierce competition by other technologies, and even unintentional radiators, that can impair traffic in unforeseen ways and impact positioning accuracy. This thesis addresses these issues by developing novel solutions for reducing the effort of deployment, including optimizing the indoor location topology for the use of WLAN positioning, as well as automatically detecting sources of cross-technology interference. These contributions pave the way for WLAN positioning to become as ubiquitous as the underlying technology.GPS-paikannus avattiin julkiseen käyttöön vuosituhannen vaihteessa, jonka jälkeen sitä on voinut käyttää sijainnin paikantamiseen ulkotiloissa kaikkialla maailmassa. Sisätiloissa GPS-signaali kuitenkin harvoin läpäisee rakennuksia kyllin hyvin voidakseen tarjota vastaavaa paikannustarkkuutta. Langattomat lähiverkot (WLAN), mukaan lukien tukiasemat ja käyttölaitteet, yleistyivät nopeasti samoihin aikoihin. Näiden verkkojen signaalien käyttö on siksi alusta asti tarjonnut lupaavia mahdollisuuksia sisätilapaikannukseen. Useimmissa ympäristöissä on jo valmiit WLAN-verkot, joten paikannuksen käyttöönotto on edullista verrattuna järjestelmiin, jotka vaativat erillisen laitteiston. Tämä johtuu osittain lisenssivapaasta taajuusalueesta, joka mahdollistaa kohtuuhintaiset päätelaitteet. WLAN-paikannuksen tarjoama tarkkuus on lisäksi riittävä monille sijaintipohjaisille palveluille, kuten suunnistamiselle ja paikkatietoisille mainoksille. Näistä lupaavista alkuasetelmista ja laajasta tutkimuksesta huolimatta WLAN-paikannus ei ole kuitenkaan pystynyt lunastamaan paikkaansa pääasiallisena sisätilapaikannusmenetelmänä. Vaivannäöstä ei ole puutetta; vuosien saatossa on julkaistu yli 20 000 tieteellistä artikkelia sekä perustettu useita yrityksiä. Syitä tähän kehitykseen on useita. Ensinnäkin, paikannuksen pystyttäminen ja ylläpito vaativat aikaa ja vaivaa. Toiseksi, langattoman signaalin eteneminen ja vuorovaikutus ympäristön kanssa on hyvin monimutkaista, mikä tekee mallintamisesta vaikeaa. Kolmanneksi, eri teknologiat ja laitteet kilpailevat lisenssivapaan taajuusalueen käytöstä, mikä johtaa satunnaisiin paikannustarkkuuteen vaikuttaviin tietoliikennehäiriöihin. Väitöskirja esittelee uusia menetelmiä joilla voidaan merkittävästi pienentää paikannusjärjestelmän asennuskustannuksia, jakaa ympäristö automaattisesti osiin WLAN-paikannusta varten, sekä tunnistaa mahdolliset langattomat häiriölähteet. Nämä kehitysaskeleet edesauttavat WLAN-paikannuksen yleistymistä jokapäiväiseen käyttöön

Enabling smart city resilience: post-disaster response and structural health monitoring

The concept of Smart Cities has been introduced to categorize a vast area of activities to enhance the quality of life of citizens. A central feature of these activities is the pervasive use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), helping cities to make better use of limited resources. Indeed, the ASCE Vision for Civil Engineering in 2025 (ASCE 2007) portends a future in which engineers will rely on and leverage real-time access to a living database, sensors, diagnostic tools, and other advanced technologies to ensure that informed decisions are made. However, these advances in technology take place against a backdrop of the deterioration of infrastructure, in addition to natural and human-made disasters. Moreover, recent events constantly remind us of the tremendous devastation that natural and human-made disasters can wreak on society. As such, emergency response procedures and resilience are among the crucial dimensions of any Smart City plan. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has recently launched plans to invest $50 million to develop cutting-edge emergency response technologies for Smart Cities. Furthermore, after significant disasters have taken place, it is imperative that emergency facilities and evacuation routes, including bridges and highways, be assessed for safety. The objective of this research is to provide a new framework that uses commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices such as smartphones, digital cameras, and unmanned aerial vehicles to enhance the functionality of Smart Cities, especially with respect to emergency response and civil infrastructure monitoring/assessment. To achieve this objective, this research focuses on post-disaster victim localization and assessment, first responder tracking and event localization, and vision-based structural monitoring/assessment, including the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This research constitutes a significant step toward the realization of Smart City Resilience

Rover-II: A Context-Aware Middleware for Pervasive Computing Environment

It is well recognized that context plays a significant role in all human endeavors. All decisions are based on information which has to be interpreted in context. By making information systems context-aware we can have systems that significantly enhance human capabilities to make critical decisions. A major challenge of context-aware systems is to balance usability with generality and extensibility. The relevant context changes depending on the particular application. The model used to represent the context and its relationship to entities must be general enough to allow additions of context categories without redesign while remaining usable across many applications. Also, while efforts are put in by application designers and developers to make applications context-aware, these efforts are customized to specific needs of the target application, and only certain common contexts like location and time are taken into account. Therefore, a general framework is called for that can (i) efficiently maintain, represent and integrate contextual information, (ii) act as an integration platform where different applications can share contexts and (iii) provide relevant services to make efficient use of the contextual information. This dissertation presents: * a generic and effective context model - Rover Context Model (RoCoM) that is structured around four primitives: entities, events, relationships, and activities; and practically usable through the concept of templates, * a flexible, extensible and generic ontology - Rover Context Model Ontology (RoCoMO) supporting the model, that addresses the shortcomings of existing ontologies, * an effective mechanism of modeling the context of a situation, through the concept of relevant context, with the help of situation graph, efficiently handling and making best use of context information, * a context middleware - Rover-II, which serves as a framework for contextual information integration, that could be used not just to store and compile the contextual information, but also integrate relevant services to enhance the context information; and more importantly, enable sharing of context among the applications subscribed to it, * the initial design and implementation of a distributed architecture for Rover-II, following a P2P arrangement inspired from Tapestry, The above concepts are illustrated through M-Urgency, a context-aware public safety system that has been deployed at the University of Maryland Police Department

2nd Edition of Health Emergency and Disaster Risk Management (Health-EDRM)

Disasters such as earthquakes, cyclones, floods, heat waves, nuclear accidents, and large-scale pollution incidents take lives and incur major health problems. The majority of large-scale disasters affect the most vulnerable populations, which often comprise extreme ages, remote living areas, and endemic poverty, as well as people with low literacy. Health emergency and disaster risk management (Health-EDRM) refers to the systematic analysis and management of health risks surrounding emergencies and disasters, and plays an important role in reducing the hazards and vulnerability along with extending preparedness, responses, and recovery measures. This concept encompasses risk analyses and interventions, such as accessible early warning systems, the timely deployment of relief workers, and the provision of suitable drugs and medical equipment to decrease the impact of disasters on people before, during, and after an event (or events). Currently, there is a major gap in the scientific literature regarding Health-EDRM to facilitate major global policies and initiatives for disaster risk reduction worldwide