Dedicated IT infrastructure for Smart Levee Monitoring and Flood Decision Support

Abstract

Smart levees are being increasingly investigated as a flood protection technology. However, in large-scale emergency situations, a flood decision support system may need to collect and process data from hundreds of kilometers of smart levees; such a scenario requires a resilient and scalable IT infrastructure, capable of providing urgent computing services in order to perform frequent data analyses required in decision making, and deliver their results in a timely fashion. We present the ISMOP IT infrastructure for smart levee monitoring, designed to support decision making in large-scale emergency situations. Most existing approaches to urgent computing services in decision support systems dealing with natural disasters focus on delivering quality of service for individual, isolated subsystems of the IT infrastructure (such as computing, storage, or data transmission). We propose a holistic approach to dynamic system management during both urgent (emergency) and normal (non-emergency) operation. In this approach, we introduce a Holistic Computing Controller which calculates and deploys a globally optimal configuration for the entire IT infrastructure, based on cost-of-operation and quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of individual IT subsystems, expressed in the form of Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Our approach leads to improved configuration settings and, consequently, better fulfilment of the system’s cost and QoS requirements than would have otherwise been possible had the configuration of all subsystems been managed in isolation.