Publication

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. © 2018, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.