Flooded streets — A crowdsourced sensing system for disaster response: A case study

Abstract

This study is about the disastrous flooding of an Indian metropolitan area of Chennai when the rain had nearly broken the record of 100-years with 374 mm rain falling on December 1, 2015, virtually breaking the November monthly average of 407.4 mm in a day. This city with a population of approximately 6.7 million people came to a standstill. Astonishingly, one of the biggest software development hubs in India was struggling for data and tools to identify which parts of the city were most affected and vulnerable to such climate phenomena. A group of software engineers quickly came up with an idea of using a Flood Map tool managed through crowdsourcing to help the citizens of Chennai and prevent further casualties. They developed a map-based tool called Flooded Streets to report flooded streets using OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. Using this Flood Map tool, anyone in the crowd could click on a street if they knew it was flooded and update the map information. Within the following 24 hours, over 2,500 streets had been reported as flooded by the citizens of Chennai using the Flood Map tool. An ordinary citizen could zoom into a locality, visualize which streets are reported as flooded and decide their next course of action. This map was also a great aid tool for relief and aid workers to track the flooded paths and provide appropriate aids in that area. The map consists of a base layer of low-lying areas created using elevation models from ISRO and NASA, and flooded areas from UNITAR. The map interactivity was built using Mapbox GL and hosted on GitHub. This crowdsourced sensing system is an extraordinary example of disaster response using the crowdsourcing concept, which potentially helped millions of people with the minimum time and resources but with great crowd contributions from both experts and non-experts.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/SysEng.2016.7753186
Divisions: College of Engineering & Physical Sciences
Additional Information: © 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Event Title: 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Systems Engineering (ISSE)
Event Type: Other
Event Dates: 2016-10-03 - 2016-10-05
Uncontrolled Keywords: Crowdsourced Sensing System,crowdsensing system,Flooded Streets,Chennai India,OpenStreetMap,crowdsourcing,Disaster Response
ISBN: 978-1-5090-0794-3, 978-1-5090-0793-6
Last Modified: 22 Jan 2024 09:24
Date Deposited: 16 Sep 2020 12:34
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: https://ieeexpl ... ocument/7753186 (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Conference contribution
Published Date: 2016-11-24
Accepted Date: 2016-01-01
Authors: Naik, Nitin (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-0659-9646)

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