Enabling smart city resilience: Post-disaster response and structural health monitoring

Yoon, Hyungchul; Spencer Jr., Billie F.

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/94943 Copy

Description

Title

Enabling smart city resilience: Post-disaster response and structural health monitoring

Author(s)

• Yoon, Hyungchul
• Spencer Jr., Billie F.

Issue Date

2016-12

Keyword(s)

• Smart city resilience
• Post-disaster response
• Structural health monitoring
• Mobile sensing
• Visual sensing
• Unmanned aerial vehicle

Abstract

The concept of Smart Cities has been introduced to categorize a vast area of activities to enhance the quality of life of citizens. A central feature of these activities is the pervasive use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), helping cities to make better use of limited resources. Indeed, the ASCE Vision for Civil Engineering in 2025 (ASCE 2007) portends a future in which engineers will rely on and leverage real-time access to a living database, sensors, diagnostic tools, and other advanced technologies to ensure that informed decisions are made. However, these advances in technology take place against a backdrop of the deterioration of infrastructure, in addition to natural and human-made disasters. Moreover, recent events constantly remind us of the tremendous devastation that natural and human-made disasters can wreak on society. As such, emergency response procedures and resilience are among the crucial dimensions of any Smart City plan. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has recently launched plans to invest $50 million to develop cutting-edge emergency response technologies for Smart Cities. Furthermore, after significant disasters have taken place, it is imperative that emergency facilities and evacuation routes, including bridges and highways, be assessed for safety. The objective of this research is to provide a new framework that uses commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices such as smartphones, digital cameras, and unmanned aerial vehicles to enhance the functionality of Smart Cities, especially with respect to emergency response and civil infrastructure monitoring/assessment. To achieve this objective, this research focuses on post-disaster victim localization and assessment, first responder tracking and event localization, and vision-based structural monitoring/assessment, including the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This research constitutes a significant step toward the realization of Smart City Resilience.

Publisher

Newmark Structural Engineering Laboratory. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Series/Report Name or Number

Newmark Structural Engineering Laboratory Report Series 047

ISSN

1940-9826

Type of Resource

text

Language

en

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http://hdl.handle.net/2142/94943

Sponsor(s)/Grant Number(s)

• National Science Foundation Grant No. 1030454
• Association of American Railroads

Copyright and License Information

Copyright held by the authors. All rights reserved.

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