Abstract
Wireless sensor and actors networks (WSANs) have become an important research area due to its large number of applications in safety, security and mission-critical systems. Natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods have distressing effects on human lives, economy and environment particularly in the developing countries due to their high population and lack of infrastructure. Earthquake is one of the major such disasters which causes a huge loss in terms of deaths, environment damages and loss of property because of its unpredictable nature. There exists much work on earthquake prediction, disaster mitigation and management but mostly is based on simulation and testing techniques which have certain limitations. Formal methods are mathematical approaches which assure correctness of systems to overcome limitations of simulation and testing techniques. That is why a formal system of earthquake disaster mitigation and management using formal methods and WSANs is proposed. Sensors and actors are deployed in the earthquakes vulnerable areas in the form of subnets which increase energy efficiency of the network as the processing becomes localized at a subnet level. Firstly, graph theory is used to represent subnet-based model which is then transformed into a formal model. Vienna Development Method-Specification Language (VDM-SL) is used to describe and prove correctness of the formal specification. The developed specification is then validated and verified through VDM-SL Toolbox facilities by analyzing the pre/post conditions and invariants over the formal system.
Highlights
Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) consist of sensors and actors connected through wireless medium
In most of the previous works, computer based simulation techniques, i.e., agent-based methodologies and complex networks are used for testing of complex adaptive systems (CAS)
Simulation techniques lack in proving complete correctness of a model because the number of test cases increases exponentially to gain a required level of confidence
Summary
Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) consist of sensors and actors connected through wireless medium. Sensors are used to sense complex events in an environment and actors take intelligent decisions and perform actions as required. Sensors are cheap devices which have low power batteries, slow processing capabilities and short communication range as compared to actors which are more expensive and powerful in terms of resources. It is noted that actors are capable of sensing the environment but sensors do not have ability to perform any action (Akyildiz and Kasimoglu 2004). As an example from military defence system, sensors detect enemy troops and report to actors which destroy the troops by coordinating with each other. For an effective monitoring and decision making, there must be a continuous sensor–sensor, sensor–actor and actor–actor communication to perform an appropriate action whenever
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