Tracking pedestrians and emergent events in disaster areas

Most of the existing research on emergency evacuation strategies focus on city evacuation planning that highly depends on the use of vehicles or evacuation from buildings. However, for large areas with limited use of vehicles such as theme parks, evacuation of pedestrians and emergent events must be tracked for safety reasons. As hazards may cause certain damages to services, networks with disaster resilience are needed to achieve missioncritical operations such as search and rescue. In this paper, we develop a method for tracking pedestrians and emergent events during disasters by opportunistic ad hoc communication. In our network model, smart-phones of pedestrians store and carry messages to a limited number of mobile sinks. Mobile sinks are responsible for communicating with smart-phones and reaching the emergent events effectively. Since the positioning of the mobile sinks has a direct impact to the network performance, we propose physical force based (PF), grid allocation based (GA) and road allocation based (RA) approaches for sink placement and mobility. The proposed approaches are analyzed through extensive network simulations using real theme park maps and a human mobility model for disaster scenarios. The simulation results show that the proposed approaches achieve significantly better network coverage and higher rescue success without producing increased communication overhead compared to two random mobile sink movement models.