An Integration and Sharing Method for Heterogeneous Sensors Oriented to Emergency Response in Smart City

It can be said that smart city will be built on the observations of sensors. Nowadays, city sensors have the features of being diverse in sensor type, different in observation mechanism and huge in quantity, and they represent a closed, isolated and autonomous observation scenario. Facing with complex city emergency events, it is inefficient to manage those heterogeneous city sensors via World Wide Web. The scarcity of the real-time, right and reliable data sourced from physical sensors and the inefficiency of emergency response decision-making seriously hinder the “smart” process of emergency response in smart city. We propose a framework for the integrating and sharing of heterogeneous city sensors oriented to emergency response. Firstly those heterogeneous sensors are uniformly described; Secondly we register them into a standard Web-based catalogue service and the registered sensor resources can be on-demand discovered; Thirdly, we construct an integration and sharing platform for city heterogeneous sensors. Last, we use waterlogging emergency response of Wuhan city as the disaster application to verify the feasibility and extensibility of integration and sharing method for heterogeneous flood-related sensors. The result shows that the proposed framework promotes the shift of heterogeneous waterlogging sensors from the observation island to integration management situation, which can lay a solid basis for sensor sharing and observation planning required in smart city emergency response.