Sensors for avoiding disasters

Bangladesh is situated on the Ganges Delta of Bay of Bengal. Many rivers from upstream are flowing through the country ending into the Bay of Bengal. 80% of Bangladesh is floodplain and has an extensive sea coastline; this makes Bangladesh prone to flooding. Each year in Bangladesh about 26,000 km² (around 18% of the country) is flooded, killing over 5,000 people and destroying more than seven million homes.

– The aim of the project is to develop a novel integrated Belief Rule-Based (BRB) system for flood risk estimation and analysis under uncertainty. The BRB system will be embedded into a Geographical Information System (GIS) to develop a hybrid decision support system (DSS) to generate, visualize and analyze the likelihood, consequences, risks and response strategies of flooding, Raihan Ul Islam, PhD student of Pervasive and Mobile Computing explains.

A wireless sensor-networking environment

The researchers at Luleå University of Technology will develop an efficient heterogeneous wireless sensor communication architecture allowing for data collection, data delivery, and basic data processing. The system will be fed with data collected using a wireless sensor network consisting of various types of sensors and various types of communication technologies forming a heterogeneous wireless sensor-networking environment.

– For this we will study different wireless sensor network technologies, carry out simulation to evaluate well-known metrics such as scalability, energy efficiency, timeliness, and message overhead and perform real world experiments, says Raihan Ul Islam.

The project Rule-based decision support system for flood risk assessment by wireless sensor networks will last for three years and is financed by the Swedish Research Council.