Towards Disaster Resilient Smart Cities: Can Internet of Things and Big Data Analytics Be the Game Changers?

Disasters (natural or man-made) can be lethal to human life, the environment, and infrastructure. The recent advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT) and the evolution in big data analytics (BDA) technologies have provided an open opportunity to develop highly needed disaster resilient smart city environments. In this paper, we propose and discuss the novel reference architecture and philosophy of a disaster resilient smart city (DRSC) through the integration of the IoT and BDA technologies. The proposed architecture offers a generic solution for disaster management activities in smart city incentives. A combination of the Hadoop Ecosystem and Spark are reviewed to develop an efficient DRSC environment that supports both real-time and offline analysis. The implementation model of the environment consists of data harvesting, data aggregation, data pre-processing, and big data analytics and service platform. A variety of datasets (i.e., smart buildings, city pollution, traffic simulator, and twitter) are utilized for the validation and evaluation of the system to detect and generate alerts for a fire in a building, pollution level in the city, emergency evacuation path, and the collection of information about natural disasters (i.e., earthquakes and tsunamis). The evaluation of the system efficiency is measured in terms of processing time and throughput that demonstrates the performance superiority of the proposed architecture. Moreover, the key challenges faced are identified and briefly discussed.