Toward a Crowdsourcing-Based Urban Flood Mitigation Platform

Abstract

Urban flood management and mitigation is one of the critical missions to maintain a stable city development. Most of the current available flood mitigation approaches are using data from fixed-site sensor systems which are not only costly but also limited in their coverage. Crowdsourcing is one of the potential approaches for addressing the coverage issue where flood data is collected and shared by crowds available everywhere. However, existing crowdsourcing-based approaches to flood mitigation systems lack thorough solutions on data validity. This paper proposes an appropriate crowdsourced data validity scheme which relies on both the scores evaluated by other users in the crowds and the accumulated reputation obtained by the user who shares the data. The paper also presents a practical mechanism to cluster reported data based on spatial and temporal information to improve the effectiveness of the data analytics. The proposed approaches have been implemented in an urban flood mitigation platform prototype running on both the IOS and the Android mobile devices. This prototype preliminarily shows the appropriateness and the usefulness of the proposed solutions.