Ubiquitous Communications and Network Computing. First International Conference, UBICNET 2017, Bangalore, India, August 3-5, 2017, Proceedings

Research Article

A Comprehensive Crowd-Sourcing Approach to Urban Flood Management

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-319-73423-1_2,
        author={Ramesh Guntha and Sethuraman Rao and Maik Benndorf and Thomas Haenselmann},
        title={A Comprehensive Crowd-Sourcing Approach to Urban Flood Management},
        proceedings={Ubiquitous Communications and Network Computing. First International Conference, UBICNET 2017, Bangalore, India, August 3-5, 2017, Proceedings},
        proceedings_a={UBICNET},
        year={2018},
        month={1},
        keywords={Urban flood relief Crowd-sourcing Smartphone sensors Sensor fusion People movement detection Structural integrity detection},
        doi={10.1007/978-3-319-73423-1_2}
    }
    
  • Ramesh Guntha
    Sethuraman Rao
    Maik Benndorf
    Thomas Haenselmann
    Year: 2018
    A Comprehensive Crowd-Sourcing Approach to Urban Flood Management
    UBICNET
    Springer
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-73423-1_2
Ramesh Guntha1,*, Sethuraman Rao1,*, Maik Benndorf2,*, Thomas Haenselmann2,*
  • 1: Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amrita University
  • 2: University of Applied Sciences Mittweida
*Contact email: rameshg@am.amrita.edu, sethuramanrao@am.amrita.edu, benndorf@hs-mittweida.de, haenselm@hs-mittweida.de

Abstract

Urban flooding is a common occurrence these days due to many reasons. Providing timely and adequate help to the victims is challenging. Enlisting the citizens to help themselves using their smartphones to provide real-time status updates and ensure timely delivery of needed help is a winning proposition. This paper describes a novel crowd-sourcing approach to urban flood management addressing the inherent challenges using smartphone applications and services that can be deployed by a variety of entities – government agencies, NGOs, social networks, etc. It enables sharing of real time information on the status of flooding, rescue and relief requests and responses, etc. It also collects data from various smartphone sensors in the background which is analyzed and synthesized to track the location and movement of people and to assess the integrity of structures such as bridges. It can also be a valuable resource for future city planning.