Smart City Solution for Disaster Management
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עברית (Hebrew)
Data sharing from human and sensor sources is crucial to the work of first responders during a disaster such as in the case of a city flooded by a nearby river, a building on fire, etc. A recent smart city pilot test has demonstrated that the key to first responders sharing data during emergencies is operation-ready technology. An interoperable framework that integrates commercial internet-of-things sensors for public-safety applications were tested in St. Louis, Missouri. The output will be the development of a data-sharing architecture at a city scale.
The Open Geospatial Consortium’s Smart City Interoperability Reference Architecture (SCIRA) was tested in five operational scenarios — preparedness, street flooding, vulnerable populations stranded in floods, a building on fire and a vehicle accident — to demonstrate how first responders, emergency managers and other city officials could use these data-sharing technologies in real-life situations.
The test featured mobile apps — some that were web-based and others that were Android- or iOS-specific — and two 3D models. One model of the whole city was used for web-based dashboards showing what was happening in a scenario and for modeling street flooding. For the preparedness scenario, it predicted what areas of the city would be most likely to flood based on rainfall and Mississippi River levels so that public-safety officials could be ready.
The other 3D model was of the interior of the T-REX Innovation Center, where responders in the fire scenario had to navigate to a blaze in the basement and also check each room for people in need of help.
The exercise with the participation of the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate was designed “to expose the volunteers to how their operations might be different with access to some of these technologies and with more of an ability to exchange and share information,” said Josh Lieberman, director of OGC’s Innovation Program. With a common operating picture, everybody could see the same observations, the same map of where things are flooded and not be on their radios all the time and try to keep each other up-to-date,” he said.
The team is now working to finish an engineering report that explains the implementation, configuration and operational experience, and they will lay out a solution that shows the architecture at a city scale should a municipality want to implement it as a pervasive and sustainable capability, according to gcn.com.
Interested in learning more about smart city and disaster management technologies? Attend i-HLS’ InnoTech Expo in Tel Aviv – Israel’s largest innovation, HLS, and cyber technologies expo – on November 18-19, 2020 at Expo Tel Aviv, Pavilion 2.
