ITS4Tsunamis: An Intelligent Transportation System for tsunami emergencies

Abstract

Natural disasters, such as tsunamis and earthquakes, may affect gravely on human lives, infrastructure, and economy. Negative effects of these situations can be minimized with the help of technology. In this paper we propose ITS4Tsunamis, an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) that combines different technologies to help emergency management agencies to provide safe routes for their emergency vehicles. In the case of a tsunami emergency, these agencies must consider different aspects when moving with their vehicles, such as the road state and the vehicle features. Technologies such as Complex Event Processing (CEP) can be used to gather and process the information provided by a collection of sensors and assess the corresponding emergency level. In addition, we introduce uncertainty as a key element when determining the road-status, since this factor is uncertain by itself, and is based on the flood level and the number and size of obstacles in the roads. Fuzzy Logic (FL) is then used to deal with uncertainty and help authorities to evaluate the road accessibility. Safe routes are obtained using Colored Petri Nets (CPNs), a graphical formalism that allows us to analyze concurrent systems. This approach has been applied to Cádiz, a city in the southwest of Spain, which is close to an active tectonic rift. This work is an extended version of the conference paper by Díaz et al. (2023) [1].