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Disaster is incident that occurs in a sudden manner, complex in nature, resulting in a loss of lives, damages to property or the environment as well as affecting the daily activities of local community. Floods are the major natural disaster threat facing Malaysia. Landslides and droughts are also significant, although most prevalent in the Eastern part of the country. Disaster management has consistently been a focus of Malaysia’s development policy. Malaysia’s National Platform for DRR was formalized in 2013, which involved various stakeholders from the whole of government, as well as the private sector. This is evident by the amount of resources provided to minimize risk factors and facilitate sustainable development. Malaysia’s 11th version of the Five-Year Plan (2016-2020) focuses on strengthening disaster risk management across five phases (prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery).
The financial impact due to natural and man-made disasters is paramount. However, the impact and loses of disaster can be reduced through effective management of disaster information. The effective management means a prompt action by the emergency response units to reach disaster area supported by appropriate and accurate information. Information of moving object such as police cars, ambulances and fire trucks become important to drive the analyzing task including connectivity analysis. Although GIS application has been used in disaster management, it was designed for individual usage such as evacuation (Pu & Zlatanova, 2005), and different phases of disaster such as mitigation and preparedness and monitoring/visualization (Rauschert, Sharma, Fuhrmann, Maceachren, & Wang, 2002), or only for specific task. During disaster relief operations, two relevant challenges arise; setting up an immediate emergency wireless network to interconnect on the field rescuers with trapped survivors and relaying the emergency network to the Internet and extended networks. Such catastrophes’ relief operations are impossible to conduct without an alternative data communication system immediately deployable and operational.
Around the world, IoT is playing a huge role in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of emergency response systems, thus saving lives and making cities safer. Ben Arbia et al. (Arbia, Alam, Kadri, Hamida, & Attia, 2017) developed an emergency and disaster relief system using heterogeneous wireless devices such as Raspberry Pi, smart phones, sensors and various communicating technologies (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth) which was then monitored by a cloud IoT platform. The challenges in a wireless autonomous communication system to offload data from the disaster area (rescuers, trapped victims, civilians, media, etc.) back to a command center were studied. Equally important, the motion detection and links’ unavailability prevention based on the recorded data where the main factors (i.e., interference and noise) that affect the performance were also analyzed. Meanwhile, Asensio et. al. (Asensio, Blanco, Blasco, Marco, & Casas, 2015) proposed Smart Signal, to offer the best message to the user, and as a ubiquitous element that contributes with information to the city. Meanwhile, Poslad et. al. (Poslad et al., 2015) presented an IoT early warning system framework based upon a multisemantic representation model that addresses the challenges faced during practical deployments such as scalable time-sensitive data exchange and processing and the need for resilience to changing ICT resource constraints in crisis zones.
Not only disaster situation, fire management system is of importance and part of emergency response system. For this reason, Asensio et al. (Asensio et al., 2015) proposed a decision support tool for the emergency fire management system which integrated the formation and management of Virtual Objects derived from real world physical objects and are virtually connected with each other into the semantic ontology model. A log repository collected all the emergency fire incident logs from Virtual Objects and stored them in a repository. On the other hand, Shamszaman et. al. (Shamszaman, Ara, Chong, & Jeong, 2014) developed an emergency fire management system in the Web of Objects infrastructure.