# A Cloud Based Disaster Management System
## 1 Introduction  
The integration of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), mobile robots, and 3D virtual environments has contributed to a wide range of applications, such as disaster management [1], emergency preparedness fire scenarios, sophisticated military training, and search and rescue. In such applications, different team members must collaborate together in order to achieve a specific mission. The synergistic combination of WSNs and 3D graphics technologies results in a near-real-time 3D true-to-life scenario based on sensor data received from the real environment, which can be viewed on a web-based 3D visualization platform. With the proposed platform, we aim to provide a smart solution by which rescue team supervisors can use real data collected from the disaster area through WSNs to understand the situation and decide upon the necessary workforce, including firefighters, medical staff, and policemen, before moving to the disaster location. In the case of a severe disaster, several autonomous agents, such as ground and/or aerial robots, are remotely sent to the disaster location to intensely investigate the disaster and send more details to the cloud concerning the number and state of victims, the fire spread patterns, etc. An instant 3D virtual environment (3D VE) must then be created to reflect the new conditions based on the observations of the agents/robots and wireless sensors. It is also important to consider the facial avatars' [2] emotions and behavior when dealing with a fire disaster to represent realistic appearance to the system user. The use of data collected using WSNs to build a near-real-time 3D environment remains a challenge due to the computation time needed for complex rendering algorithms, bandwidth constraints, and signal fading. To this end, cloud architecture has been integrated to address these problems. Cloud computing provides services and resource solutions for disaster management applications. The capability to transform and modify a 3D collaborative virtual environment (CVE) on the fly without the need to stop its operations is a challenging task, especially when applied in important applications like disaster management programs and military exercises. The contributions of this work are as follows:  
* First, we designed and implemented a routing protocol for WSNs tailored to the requirements of disaster management applications. These requirements include reliability, scalability, efficiency, and latency. We extended the routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL) by designing a new objective function, Cyber-OF (Cyber-Objective Function), that improves upon the existing objective functions of RPL, which do not take into account the cyber-physical properties of the environment. The Cyber-OF objective function is designed to satisfy a combination of metrics instead of a single metric, as well as to be adaptive to possible changes in data criticality during a disastrous event, such as a fire. * Second, we developed a complete 3D platform system to render the 3D environment remotely in the cloud and then stream the scenes to clients over the Internet. To reflect the real physical environment exactly, the resulting 3D environment is generated based on data received from WSNs deployed in the physical environment. Additionally, we integrated a scripting story interpreter component in the game engine to handle and monitor avatar face animation changes. The designers programmed the game engine to distinguish the programming language applied in implementing the game from the game's different scenarios, and to provide flexible and simple systems to users when changes are necessary. * Third, we aimed to come up with an efficient rescue plan scenario for the resulting 3D environment, within an acceptable response time to solve the previous drawbacks happened in reality. We formulated the problem as a multi-objective multiple traveling salesman problem (MTSP), wherein we had to assign resources (robots, drones, firefighters, etc.)