Developing Ecosystem for Tracking Vehicles in Disaster Prone Areas

The automotive industry, now known as the mobility industry, has become the backbone of the daily commute of every second person. Considerable research and study are being carried out to improve such mobility. It has been observed, however, that very few studies are focusing on mobility in disaster-prone areas, although improving the quality of mobility under such conditions is of the utmost priority. This chapter describes the mobility of vehicles in disaster-prone areas, especially with respect to rescuing the vehicle in post-disaster scenarios, if trapped and the location of the vehicle is unknown. The unpredictable changes in climate which lead to disaster situations would result in the failure of the cellular network system. In such scenarios, the first seventy-two hours are crucial in terms of rescue operations, which emphasizes the essential need for the design of a sustainable communications network. This chapter presents the design and development of an indigenous sensor network with a focus on the localization of vehicles in disaster-prone areas. The performance of the proposed system was tested in an open seismic area, and a step-wise procedure was presented to establish the indigenous network. The communication network for the present study consists of mobile wireless nodes, which are interconnected with one another, incorporating the hybrid design of unilateration (a real-time locating system) and fingerprinting algorithms. The chapter also discussed the design of algorithms for localization and their validation. Such types of proposed ecosystems result in the safety increment factor of mobility in disaster-prone areas by monitoring and locating the vehicle’s movement, with minimal environmental effects.