A mobile social networking service for urban community disaster response

Abstract

When disaster strikes the urban community, residents may suffer life-threatening, environmental impact, and economic loss. Meanwhile, the cellular and Internet services are prone to be fail because the disaster may cause the network infrastructure damage. As the communication service is so important for the disaster response, we suggest an emergency social networking solution, called ECSN, to conquer such crisis. ECSN is a community-based emergent social networking service suitable for dealing with the tasks on disaster response. To provide the ECSN service, we construct a Disaster Response Portal dedicated designed for disaster management. From the software architecture perspective, it has mobile client agents and server-side services working together to realize the concept of “Community Social Networking”. Through the Disaster Response Portal, the local disaster rescue and response can be integrated with nationwide disaster management. Also, disaster response can be easily planned and manageable at a community scope and benefits other emergent measures taken by disaster prevention, mitigation, preparedness, and recovery. After simulation experiments validate, the result shows the system can work well on the problem domain. Most importantly, the total solution creates a new practicable model for the mobility of urban disaster response.