DEVELOPMENT OF A GEO.I AZARD WARNING COMMUNICATION SYSTEM

Abstract

Communication of an impending hazard to people in near real time is critical. A system capable of disseminating adequate and timely warning to the public is of great societal value. Existing early warning systems are based on intensive dedicated infra-structure and proclamation through telephone, fax, television, radio etc. but not SMS. One of the major drawbacks of the existing systems is that they have been developed for site-specific hazards. And most of these are authoritative warning systems and cannot disseminate automated warning to the affected people. A warning system using prevalent technologies based on popular usage helps to proclaim warning quickly and easily. Thus, it is prudent to look for a system which could be developed with available infrastructure, instruments and set-ups and reaches affected• people in time. The increasing number of mobile ' phone subscriptions, around 5 billion worldwide, shows that a large number of persons can be reached via a mobile phone service through short message service. Mobile communication infrastructure is pervasive and a local disaster cannot shut its communication capabilities completely. One possible solution could be a system capable of interfacing a hazard evaluation system and making use of available communication infrastructure to notify the same to the public. The primary objective of this research work has been to develop an automated geo-hazard warning communication system based on internet-resident concept and available cellular mobile infrastructure. The challenges towards achieving the desired objective have been tried to be realized through the integration of hazard evaluation system with hazard warning communication system; interfacing of communication technology with internet technology and database management; technology based modular architecture enabling 1 encapsulation• and abstraction of data and information; and, automated initiation, interactions, processing and dissemination of information. The challenges have led to the development of a system making use of spatial information technology, internet technology and communication technology. The architecture of proposed system consists of four functional modules based on above technologies: database module, web-content handler module, trigger module and communication module. The hazard information along with registered mobile subscribers' •data is provided to system through an external event system-call. It gets initiated once the hazard information reaches communication module. The communication module initiates downward flow of command calls through trigger module. Trigger module invokes web-content handler and database module. Once database module gets invoked, flow of control gets reversed i.e. from database module to web-content handler then to trigger module and subsequently to communication module. Finally, communication module sends SMSes. In the research work, a web-based application, which utilizes Short Message Service in Global System for Mobile Communications, has been proposed. The development of the system for geo-hazard warning communication built on the facilities of Internet and Wireless Mobile Network and their inter-communications has been described. The system is a web-application which merges internet protocols with mobile communication to send SMS. A solution based on the cell multicast in GSM and showing numerical results regarding the delay and the capacity of the SMS is presented. The validation of the developed system has been based on the results of two case studies in the domain of landslide hazard, first of which was tested in Indian conditions and second was in Italian conditions. ii In the Indian context, the messages have been transmitted in a set of 20 SMSs six times, to intended mobile numbers, resulting in a total number of 120. It has been found that 58 messages got delivered within 10 seconds, rest within 40 more seconds. In the trials minimum and maximum times of delivery have been recorded as 10 and 50 seconds respectively. Average time for SMS delivery has been found to vary from 29 to 30 seconds. The results show that average delay is within acceptable limits as put down by authorities in UN. In the study in Italy, 15 SMSs were transmitted ten times, resulting in a total number of 150. It was found that 102 messages got delivered within 10 seconds, rest within 30 seconds. Maximum duration SMS took was 50 seconds, minimum duration taken was 5 seconds and average time was 15 seconds. For both studies, the message permeability was found to be virtually instantaneous with a maximum time lag recorded as 50 seconds, and minimum of 10 seconds. On an average within 30 seconds the perceived threat message reaches a mobile user registered to the system. Hence the developmental work presented here can be summarized as the development of internet-SMS based automated geo-hazard warning communication system; integrating a warning communication system with a hazard evaluation system; interfacing different open-source technologies towards design and development of a warning system; modularization of different technologies towards development of a warning communication system; automated data creation,. transformation and dissemination over different interfaces. The architecture of the developed warning system has been functionally automated as well as generalized enough that can be used for any hazard and setup requirement has been kept to a minimum. The major outcome of the study is the development of an internet-SMS based geo-hazard warning communication system. The developed system is modular in structure, iii light on resources and expenditure. The modularity of the system provides flexibility in getting integrated with different types of hazard evaluation systems leading to a generalized hazard warning system. So it could be summarized that a novel and stand-alone system for dynamic hazard warning has been developed and implemented. iv