Offline crisis mapping by opportunistic dissemination of crisis data after large-scale disasters

Decision making after an emergency like those after a large-scale disaster (natural/man-made) is often impaired due the non-availability of crisis information from field. The key reason behind such hindrance in getting information off the field is due to disruption/breaking of conventional communication channel (manual or automatic) as an outcome of the crisis event. The post-crisis operations like evacuation, rescue-relief are affected at large due to poor decision making and lack of coordination among the field workers and officials in charge of the emergency management and mitigation. This leads to added suffering to the victims, increased death-toll, and mass agitation, anger and mistrust among all the stake-holders. Humanitarian organizations present crisis mapping services for shaping the rescue-relief activities. The crisis mapping systems collects crisis data from online social media, news feeds, etc., and portrays them through an online map server. However, in a situation when network is disrupted, such services become useless. In this work of ours, we would like to present an application that may run on Android-based mobile devices and could prepare 'localized' crisis map through 'offline' crowd-sourcing of situational data and a distributed processing of the collected data in seamless manner. To ensure that the generated localized crisis map hold the most important information, and that it contains information from almost every corner of the affected area, a novel data dissemination strategy is proposed. For better serving the affected community, the resulting crisis data is portrayed on a nice map interface generated locally, whenever possible. In addition to crisis data, mobility trails of other users, whenever available, are embedded on the same interface for the purpose of travel route suggestion for the users in a changing environment after the crisis.