Intelligent Digital System in Urban Natural Hazard Mitigation

The intelligent technique is becoming the most important and powerful aided tool to manage the infrastructure information and reduce the urban natural hazards. This paper presents the development in building the smart digital China programs and the application of the digital technique to mitigate natural hazard in Chinese cities. The digital techniques in this paper mean the "3S" technique, which is geographical information system (GIS), globe positioning system (GPS) and remote sensing (RS). As one of the powerful and the most popular tools, 3S is applied to these systems for infrastructure information management and natural hazard reduction. So far, most of Chinese cities have built their own intelligent digital natural hazard systems, which are mainly built based on 3S. Some details techniques in the procedure of building the digital system, including the integration methods, data transferring and data communication among 3S systems, are discussed. The principle, design criteria, structure and functions of these systems are also described in this paper. As an illustration, several successful cases are illustrated.