Smart Path Planning in Flooded Regions Based on Route APIs

Abstract

The disaster brought by heavy rain has become more and more serious due to global warming. The intention of this paper is to automatically produce a route which does not pass through flooded areas to ensure the safety of travelers. We explore the techniques of using cloud services, which are very popular recently due to their efficiency and availability. The basic idea of the proposed approach is to first get the usual best path from the online route API provided by cloud services. If any portion of this route is flooded and unpassable, we identify their nearby unflooded intersections. From all the candidate sets, we then pick those which can form the shortest path between the source and the target locations, and invoke the route API again with the chosen intersections as waypoints to re-plan the route. Spatial indices and corresponding algorithms are designed to expedite the above process. We have implemented the proposed approach and conducted extensive experiments with real and synthetic data-sets. Experimental results indicate the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed method.