Cloud asset management for urban flood control

Abstract

Urban flooding, frequently occurring in metropolitan areas, is one of the worst natural disasters worldwide that brings severe impacts. Albeit a large number of measures have been designed for urban flood control, the ineffective and inefficiency management of physical assets involved has greatly impeded their deployment, and the performance of these assets has already become one of the major determinant success factors for urban flood control. However, managing physical assets in urban flood control is extremely challenging as there are a huge amount of diverse physical assets involved, which are distributed throughout the city, owned by different agencies, and operated in diverse scenarios. This research proposes an integrated platform for the physical asset management in urban flood control to improve its management effectiveness and efficiency, and finally guarantee the success of urban flood control. Through analyzing the physical assets involved and their management scenarios, a cloud-based asset management platform is proposed, which could manage all the physical assets throughout the whole process of urban flood control. Besides, the concept of cloud asset is introduced, with its technical architecture and corresponding management services. Cloud asset enables automatic data collection and remote control of physical assets, and makes the management of them much more flexible. Furthermore, as a typical application built upon the cloud-based platform, the lifecycle management system for cloud asset is also developed. Finally, a case on emergency fleet management is conducted to verify how the proposed asset management platform could benefit typical management activities in urban flood control. Several major contributions can be summarized in the following. Firstly, this work innovatively proposes an asset-centric approach for managing the physical assets in urban flood control. Meanwhile, to implement this idea into reality, an integrated cloud-based asset management platform is proposed by integrating various technologies. The platform could provide management services for all the physical assets involved, and be flexible enough to work in diverse scenarios of urban flood control. Secondly, the concept of cloud asset is first introduced in this research. It is the key enabler to realize asset-centric management in urban flood control. Meanwhile, this concept makes it possible for physical assets to work in diverse scenarios and be shared among agencies. Besides, cloud asset shifts the management of physical asset from managing its physical status and functions to managing its capabilities and services in the cloud, which is much more flexible and efficient. Thirdly, a data-centric lifecycle management system for cloud asset is proposed. It could not only extract rich lifecycle information from complex connections among diverse physical assets, but also well handle the data collisions caused by multiple data sources and the instability of networks. Fourthly, based on the advantages of cloud asset and its management platform, this research proposes a data-driven dynamic management mechanism for emergency fleet management in urban flood control. It enables real-time monitoring and controlling of various vehicles, and makes the management of emergency fleet resilient to cope with disruptions to sustain a required service level.