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1. Emergency Incident Detection from Crowdsourced Waze Data using Bayesian Information Fusion

   https://doi.org/10.1109/WIIAT50758.2020.00029  

   Senarath, Yasas ; Nannapaneni, Saideep ; Purohit, Hemant ; Dubey, Abhishek ( December 2020 , 2020 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT))

   The number of emergencies have increased over the years with the growth in urbanization. This pattern has overwhelmed the emergency services with limited resources and demands the optimization of response processes. It is partly due to traditional ‘reactive’ approach of emergency services to collect data about incidents, where a source initiates a call to the emergency number (e.g., 911 in U.S.), delaying and limiting the potentially optimal response. Crowdsourcing platforms such as Waze provides an opportunity to develop a rapid, ‘proactive’ approach to collect data about incidents through crowd-generated observational reports. However, the reliability of reporting sources and spatio-temporal uncertainty of the reported incidents challenge the design of such a proactive approach. Thus, this paper presents a novel method for emergency incident detection using noisy crowdsourced Waze data. We propose a principled computational framework based on Bayesian theory to model the uncertainty in the reliability of crowd-generated reports and their integration across space and time to detect incidents. Extensive experiments using data collected from Waze and the official reported incidents in Nashville, Tenessee in the U.S. show our method can outperform strong baselines for both Fl-score and AUC. The application of this work provides an extensible framework to incorporate differentmore »noisy data sources for proactive incident detection to improve and optimize emergency response operations in our communities.« less
2. Learning Incident Prediction Models Over Large Geographical Areas for Emergency Response Systems

   Vazirizade, Sayyed ; Mukhopadhyay, Ayan ; Pettet, Geoffrey ; El Said, Said ; Baroud, Hiba ; Dubey, Abhishek ( January 2021 , IEEE Conference on Smart Computing. SmartComp 2021.)

   Principled decision making in emergency response management necessitates the use of statistical models that predict the spatial-temporal likelihood of incident occurrence. These statistical models are then used for proactive stationing which allocates first responders across the spatial area in order to reduce overall response time. Traditional methods that simply aggregate past incidents over space and time fail to make useful short-term predictions when the spatial region is large and focused on fine-grained spatial entities like interstate highway networks. This is partially due to the sparsity of incidents with respect to the area in consideration. Further, accidents are affected by several covariates, and collecting, cleaning, and managing multiple streams of data from various sources is challenging for large spatial areas. In this paper, we highlight how this problem is being solved for the state of Tennessee, a state in the USA with a total area of over 100,000 sq. km. Our pipeline, based on a combination of synthetic resampling, non-spatial clustering, and learning from data can efficiently forecast the spatial and temporal dynamics of accident occurrence, even under sparse conditions. In the paper, we describe our pipeline that uses data related to roadway geometry, weather, historical accidents, and real-time traffic congestionmore »to aid accident forecasting. To understand how our forecasting model can affect allocation and dispatch, we improve upon a classical resource allocation approach. Experimental results show that our approach can significantly reduce response times in the field in comparison with current approaches followed by first responders.« less
3. Data-Driven Flood Alert System (FAS) Using Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) to Forecast Flood Stages

   https://doi.org/10.3390/w14050747  

   Sanders, Will ; Li, Dongfeng ; Li, Wenzhao ; Fang, Zheng N. ( March 2022 , Water)

   Heavy rainfall leads to severe flooding problems with catastrophic socio-economic impacts worldwide. Hydrologic forecasting models have been applied to provide alerts of extreme flood events and reduce damage, yet they are still subject to many uncertainties due to the complexity of hydrologic processes and errors in forecasted timing and intensity of the floods. This study demonstrates the efficacy of using eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) as a state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) model to forecast gauge stage levels at a 5-min interval with various look-out time windows. A flood alert system (FAS) built upon the XGBoost models is evaluated by two historical flooding events for a flood-prone watershed in Houston, Texas. The predicted stage values from the FAS are compared with observed values with demonstrating good performance by statistical metrics (RMSE and KGE). This study further compares the performance from two scenarios with different input data settings of the FAS: (1) using the data from the gauges within the study area only and (2) including the data from additional gauges outside of the study area. The results suggest that models that use the gauge information within the study area only (Scenario 1) are sufficient and advantageous in terms of their accuracy inmore »predicting the arrival times of the floods. One of the benefits of the FAS outlined in this study is that the XGBoost-based FAS can run in a continuous mode to automatically detect floods without requiring an external starting trigger to switch on as usually required by the conventional event-based FAS systems. This paper illustrates a data-driven FAS framework as a prototype that stakeholders can utilize solely based on their gauging information for local flood warning and mitigation practices.« less
4. Forecasting Groundwater Table in a Flood Prone Coastal City with Long Short-term Memory and Recurrent Neural Networks

   https://doi.org/10.3390/w11051098  

   Bowes, Benjamin D. ; Sadler, Jeffrey M. ; Morsy, Mohamed M. ; Behl, Madhur ; Goodall, Jonathan L. ( May 2019 , Water)

   Many coastal cities are facing frequent flooding from storm events that are made worse by sea level rise and climate change. The groundwater table level in these low relief coastal cities is an important, but often overlooked, factor in the recurrent flooding these locations face. Infiltration of stormwater and water intrusion due to tidal forcing can cause already shallow groundwater tables to quickly rise toward the land surface. This decreases available storage which increases runoff, stormwater system loads, and flooding. Groundwater table forecasts, which could help inform the modeling and management of coastal flooding, are generally unavailable. This study explores two machine learning models, Long Short-term Memory (LSTM) networks and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN), to model and forecast groundwater table response to storm events in the flood prone coastal city of Norfolk, Virginia. To determine the effect of training data type on model accuracy, two types of datasets (i) the continuous time series and (ii) a dataset of only storm events, created from observed groundwater table, rainfall, and sea level data from 2010–2018 are used to train and test the models. Additionally, a real-time groundwater table forecasting scenario was carried out to compare the models’ abilities to predict groundwater tablemore »levels given forecast rainfall and sea level as input data. When modeling the groundwater table with observed data, LSTM networks were found to have more predictive skill than RNNs (root mean squared error (RMSE) of 0.09 m versus 0.14 m, respectively). The real-time forecast scenario showed that models trained only on storm event data outperformed models trained on the continuous time series data (RMSE of 0.07 m versus 0.66 m, respectively) and that LSTM outperformed RNN models. Because models trained with the continuous time series data had much higher RMSE values, they were not suitable for predicting the groundwater table in the real-time scenario when using forecast input data. These results demonstrate the first use of LSTM networks to create hourly forecasts of groundwater table in a coastal city and show they are well suited for creating operational forecasts in real-time. As groundwater table levels increase due to sea level rise, forecasts of groundwater table will become an increasingly valuable part of coastal flood modeling and management.« less
5. Flood mitigation in coastal urban catchments using real-time stormwater infrastructure control and reinforcement learning

   https://doi.org/10.2166/hydro.2020.080  

   Bowes, Benjamin D. ; Tavakoli, Arash ; Wang, Cheng ; Heydarian, Arsalan ; Behl, Madhur ; Beling, Peter A. ; Goodall, Jonathan L. ( October 2020 , Journal of Hydroinformatics)

   Abstract Flooding in coastal cities is increasing due to climate change and sea-level rise, stressing the traditional stormwater systems these communities rely on. Automated real-time control (RTC) of these systems can improve performance, and creating control policies for smart stormwater systems is an active area of study. This research explores reinforcement learning (RL) to create control policies to mitigate flood risk. RL is trained using a model of hypothetical urban catchments with a tidal boundary and two retention ponds with controllable valves. RL's performance is compared to the passive system, a model predictive control (MPC) strategy, and a rule-based control strategy (RBC). RL learns to proactively manage pond levels using current and forecast conditions and reduced flooding by 32% over the passive system. Compared to the MPC approach using a physics-based model and genetic algorithm, RL achieved nearly the same flood reduction, just 3% less than MPC, with a significant 88× speedup in runtime. Compared to RBC, RL was able to quickly learn similar control strategies and reduced flooding by an additional 19%. This research demonstrates that RL can effectively control a simple system and offers a computationally efficient method that could scale to RTC of more complex stormwater systems.