Abstract
In large-scale earthquakes, it is important to quickly collect and utilize disaster information such as building collapse, street blockage, and fire outbreaks to mitigate disasters. In this paper, we develop a Web application for users to gather and share disaster information in real time. With this system, it is possible to not only share disaster information among users, but also to execute a simulation such as a fire. Next, conduct a demonstration experiment by local volunteers and investigate the usefulness and effectiveness of the system that collects disaster information. Furthermore, we analyze delay in sharing information under bandwidth-limited network environment and demonstrate the effectiveness of the system.
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- 1.
Users in this research indicate information providers who collect disaster information using the system. On the other hand, firefighters or decision makers for disaster mitigation will be information seekers. We don’t discuss the details of their roles due to the limitation of spaces.
- 2.
We do not limit data collection to employees of public bodies. We also anticipate numerous volunteers from the general population. Since we might see lower accuracy of the information obtained from large numbers of unspecified people, we expect it to be necessary to establish password-protected login accounts and filtering, or to use some other means of managing the submitted information as appropriate.
- 3.
“Real-time” in this study means the property that the required processing can be completed within a certain time in response.
- 4.
“Event-driven” means that other software executes the program. In other words, processing is initiated by the user or by an operation of another program (event). This is in contrast with the concept of “flow-driven” processing (in which the system is controlled by the execution flow of a program).
- 5.
The input/output processing involved in storage is distributed processing in MongoDB, which is a NoSQL database employing parallel processing that is compatible with Node.js. Many packages have been developed for operating this database format, which is designed to facilitate system server data searches, retrieval, and insertion.
- 6.
According to Tokyo Fire Department (2015), from the point of view of reducing damage due to the spread of fires throughout the city, firefighters should not be dispatched as soon as they are notified of a fire somewhere. Instead, they should wait for some time (15 min) after the occurrence of an earthquake in order to gather and organize information. The most effective response is for them to be dispatched to the fires that have been prioritized on the basis of their risk of spreading. That is why disaster information is gathered for 15 min in this study.
- 7.
In this study, submitted damage types that differed from the types displayed in the icons of the virtual damage markers, and any virtual damage that had been misidentified due to submission from a location too distant from the virtual damage marker were treated as erroneous submissions.
- 8.
Volunteers in this research are assumed to be well trained and educated volunteers who will make action for disaster mitigation. Actually, around 0.12% of general residents are registered for such volunteers in Setagaya City.
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Acknowledgements
A portion of this work is supported by Cross-ministerial Strategic Innovation Promotion Program (SIP). The author wishes to express their sincere thanks to Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST).
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Osaragi, T., Niwa, I. (2018). Development of System for Real-Time Collection, Sharing, and Use of Disaster Information. In: Mansourian, A., Pilesjö, P., Harrie, L., van Lammeren, R. (eds) Geospatial Technologies for All. AGILE 2018. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78208-9_11
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