Development of a support system for creating disaster prevention maps focusing on road networks and hazardous elements

As a disaster prevention measure based on self-assistance and mutual assistance,disaster prevention maps are being created with citizen participation throughout Japan.The process of creating disaster prevention maps is itself a disaster prevention measure that contributes to raising awareness of disaster prevention by promoting exchange and cooperation within the region.By focusing on relations between road networks and hazardous elements,we developed a system to support disaster prevention map creation that visualizes roads at high risk during a disaster and facilitates the study of evacuation simulations.This system leads to a completed disaster prevention map in three phases.In the first phase,we use a device with GPS logging functions to collect information related to hazardous elements.In the second phase,we use Google Maps(“online map,”below)to visualize roads with high evacuation risk.In the final phase,we perform a regional evaluation through simulations of disaster-time evacuations.In experimental verifications,by conducting usability tests after creating a disaster prevention map in the target area,we evaluated the system in terms of simple operability and visibility.We found that by implementing this series of processes,even users lacking specialized knowledge regarding disaster prevention can intuitively discover evacuation routes while considering the relations between visualized road networks and hazardous elements.These results show that compared with disaster prevention maps having simple site notations using existing WebGIS systems,disaster prevention maps created by residents while inspecting the target area raise awareness of risks present in the immediate vicinity even in normal times and are an effective support system for prompt disaster prevention measures and evacuation drills.

RFES: a real-time fire evacuation system for Mobile Web3D

There are many bottlenecks that limit the computing power of the Mobile Web3 D and they need to be solved before implementing a public fire evacuation system on this platform.In this study,we focus on three key problems:(1)The scene data for large-scale building information modeling(BIM)are huge,so it is difficult to transmit the data via the Internet and visualize them on the Web;(2)The raw fire dynamic simulator(FDS)smoke diffusion data are also very large,so it is extremely difficult to transmit the data via the Internet and visualize them on the Web;(3)A smart artificial intelligence fire evacuation app for the public should be accurate and real-time.To address these problems,the following solutions are proposed:(1)The large-scale scene model is made lightweight;(2)The amount of dynamic smoke is also made lightweight;(3)The dynamic obstacle maps established from the scene model and smoke data are used for optimal path planning using a heuristic method.We propose a real-time fire evacuation system based on the ant colony optimization(RFES-ACO)algorithm with reused dynamic pheromones.Simulation results show that the public could use Mobile Web3 D devices to experience fire evacuation drills in real time smoothly.The real-time fire evacuation system(RFES)is efficient and the evacuation rate is better than those of the other two algorithms,i.e.,the leader-follower fire evacuation algorithm and the random fire evacuation algorithm.