Urban infrastructure safety system based on mobile crowdsensing

Abstract

Urban infrastructure safety information collection and investigation from public participants has become a trend in the era of big data. Mobile crowdsensing has facilitated ubiquitous mobile sensing applications between humans and the surrounding physical world as a convenient and economical sensing technology. This study presents an urban infrastructure safety monitoring system, known as Urban Safety, which makes urban infrastructure damage information collection possible for public participants, and allows monitoring and emergency evaluation in the field of disaster prevention and mitigation. Firstly, the Urban Safety system is presented as a system that allows integration of service-oriented architectures with resource optimization mechanisms for crowdsensing. Additionally, an Urban Safety application (app) is developed and presented based on the Android platform. The app acts as a sensor to collect urban data, such as structural acceleration, structural deformation, questionnaires, and images, and implements disaster emergency communications without the use of a network. It then uploads collected data to a website. Subsequently, the urban safety database can be established after the processing of sensed data uploaded by the user. Additionally, verification experiments were carried out at the Dalian University of Technology (DLUT), including displacement monitoring, bridge cable acceleration measurements, and image collection of the DLUT campus buildings. Finally, the experimental results show the feasible and effective use of Urban Safety for safety information monitoring of urban infrastructures.