Smart Disaster Management and Responses for Smart Cities: A new Challenge for the Next Generation of Distributed Simulation Systems

Every year, natural and human-induced disasters result in infrastructural damages, monetary costs, distresses, injuries and deaths. Unfortunately, climate change is strengthening the destructive power of natural disasters. In this context, distributed simulation-based disaster management and response systems have been proposed to cope with disasters and emergencies by training first responder with the latest ICT technology, and improving the disaster detection and search/rescue missions during disaster response. With the recent advances in wireless communication, and the proliferation of portable computer and micro-sensor devices, we are witnessing a growing interest in using wireless multimedia sensor networks and collaborative virtual environment technologies for safety and security class of applications. In this talk, we will give an overview of some research projects related to smart emergency preparedness and response that are currently being investigated at the PARADISE Research Laboratory at the Ottawa. We will show how collaborative virtual environment, context aware computing, wireless multimedia, and wireless sensor networks can be used to ensure public safety and security. We will focus upon the design of large-scale distributed simulation system for applications that require critical condition monitoring using both location/context aware computing and wireless sensor technologies. The second part of the talk will conclude by presenting two testbeds that are currently under development at PARADISE: the LIVE testbed, and the SWiMNet testbed. LIVE is a testbed for applications that require emergency preparedness and response. LIVE’s architecture integrates wireless sensor networks with wireless multimedia and virtual environment technologies. SWiMNet is a testbed of a high-performance simulation system that supports very detailed and realistic model specifications to enable the design and evaluation of new protocols and applications for future generations of mobile networks, vehicular networks as well as sensor networks.