Department of Production Engineering, University of Bremen, 28539 Bremen, Germany.
BIBA-Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH, Hochschulring 20, 28359 Bremen, Germany.
Sensors (Basel). 2019 Mar 7;19(5):1150. doi: 10.3390/s19051150.
Natural disasters and catastrophes not only cost the loss of human lives, but adversely affect the progress toward sustainable development of the country. As soon as disaster strikes, the first and foremost challenge for the concerned authorities is to make an expeditious response. Consequently, they need to be highly-organized, properly-trained, and sufficiently-equipped to effectively respond and limit the destructive effects of a disaster. In such circumstances, communication plays a vital role, whereby the consequences of tasks assigned to the workers for rescue and relief services may be streamlined by relaying necessary information among themselves. Moreover, most of the infrastructure is either severely damaged or completely destroyed in post-disaster scenarios; therefore, a Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is used to carry out the rescue operation, as it does not require any pre-existing infrastructure. In this context, the current work proposes and validates an effective way to relay the crucial information through the development of an application and the deployment of an experimental TestBed in a vehicular environment. The TestBed may able to provide a way to design and validate the algorithms. It provides a number of vehicles with onboard units embedded with a credit-card-size microcomputer called Raspberry Pi and a Global Positioning System (GPS) module. Additionally, it dispatches one of the pre-defined codes of emergency messages based on the level of urgency through multiple hops to a central control room. Depending on the message code received from a client, the server takes appropriate action. Furthermore, the solution also provides a graphical interface that is easy to interpret and to understand at the control room to visualize the rescue operation on the fly.
自然灾害和灾难不仅造成人类生命的损失，而且对国家可持续发展的进展产生不利影响。一旦灾难发生，有关当局面临的首要挑战是迅速做出反应。因此，他们需要高度组织化、经过适当培训和充分装备，以便能够有效地应对和限制灾害的破坏性影响。在这种情况下，通信起着至关重要的作用，通过在工作人员之间传递必要的信息，可以简化分配给他们的救援和救济服务的任务的后果。此外，大多数基础设施在灾后场景中要么严重受损，要么完全被毁；因此，使用车载自组织网络 (VANET) 来进行救援行动，因为它不需要任何预先存在的基础设施。在这种情况下，目前的工作提出并验证了一种通过开发应用程序和在车辆环境中部署实验测试床来传递关键信息的有效方法。测试床可以为设计和验证算法提供一种方法。它为多辆带有车载单元的车辆配备了一个信用卡大小的微型计算机，称为 Raspberry Pi 和全球定位系统 (GPS) 模块。此外，它通过多个跳数根据紧急程度向中央控制室发送一个预定义的紧急消息代码之一。根据从客户端接收到的消息代码，服务器采取适当的行动。此外，该解决方案还提供了一个易于在控制室内解释和理解的图形界面，以便实时可视化救援行动。
