Integrating geographical information and augmented reality techniques for mobile escape guidelines on nuclear accident sites
Introduction
Several serious nuclear accidents have occurred in the past few decades, such as the Three Mile Island accident in the United States and the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine. On March 11, 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake that caused a tsunami struck the coast of Japan. This earthquake not only inflicted severe damage but also affected the Japanese nuclear plants, especially the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. These disasters have highlighted the importance of nuclear accident emergency management, such as reducing the likelihood of accidents, responding to accidents, minimizing damage, providing emergency assistance, and recovering the original status (Federal Emergency Management Agency, 2011). This study focuses on nuclear accident emergency response, since nuclear accidents occur suddenly so that reaction time is quite short. When nuclear accidents are handled promptly, serious damage can be prevented.
Nuclear accidents differ from other types of disasters (e.g., fires and hurricanes). For example, the radioactive pollution continues for years because hazardous materials spread into the air and water. Many countries have therefore devised emergency response strategies, including confining nuclear accident sites, monitoring site changes, evacuating population from the site, organizing relief personnel, and establishing emergency response centers. In order to implement these strategies, many researchers proposed Information Technology (IT)-based methodologies and applications. Government agencies and personnel use these methodologies and applications to deal efficiently with nuclear accidents. However, during nuclear accidents, although evacuating people near the accident sites and avoiding exposure within the radioactive environment are top priorities, few studies have investigated the information systems that address these issues.
This study integrates the geographical information and augmented reality techniques to develop an application called Mobile Escape Guidelines (MEG). The objective of MEG is to enable users to access the escape guidelines by using their mobile phones when they perform self-evacuation from nuclear accident sites. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews numerous studies of the nuclear accident emergency response. Based on the literature review, Section 3 presents research questions. Section 4 describes an approach to the questions. Section 5 implements the approach. After a testing, Section 6 shows the results. Section 7 raises discussions and Section 8 concludes.
Section snippets
Literature review
Based on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) that was announced by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA, 2008), nuclear events are divided into nuclear incidents and nuclear accidents (Table 1). For a nuclear accident emergency response, Table 2 lists some IT-based solutions. Among these solutions, many researchers constructed Decision Support Systems (DSSs), since government agencies and personnel require various analysis results when making decisions in
Research questions
After the literature review, this study identifies the following two research questions:
- 1.
The lack of mobile phone-based information systems: When people are near nuclear accident sites, they have problems synchronously accessing information through computers and laptops during the evacuation, since they have difficulty bringing in these heavy operation devices. In other words, the people cannot benefit from DSSs, since these systems not only are reliant on computers and laptops but also are
Approach
Nuclear accidents influence the areas from several square meters to several square kilometers. When people evacuate from nuclear accident sites to temporary rescue shelters, they either wait for relief personnel or consult the escape guidelines. However, government agencies and personnel may ignore the evaluation results of nuclear accidents so that the response time is delayed. For example, the Soviet Union and the Japanese government responded slowly to the Chernobyl and the Fukushima
Implementation
When users on nuclear accident sites need self-escape, they interact with the MEG to perform information queries, to access the exchanging information, and to collaborate with other users. Since the storage capability of mobile phones is limited, this study constructs the MEG and several information servers (e.g., the Web and database servers). These servers offer necessary data for the MEG. Therefore, the information flow among the users, the MEG, and the information servers is the three-tier
Testing
This study tested the MEG on the third nuclear plant that is located in southern Taiwan. The testing scenario was that a serious earthquake affected this nuclear plant, as shown in Fig. 3. Emergency response centers were established and relief personnel were organized. Based on the INES, the nuclear accident was identified as Level 5. For example, when fire breaks out in a reactor core, radioactive materials are released into the environment. The relief personnel enter the nuclear accident
Discussions
After the testing, although the anticipated objective of the MEG was reached, this study discussed ways in which this application could be improved. Some suggestions involve:
- 1.
Integrating with other emergency response systems: The MEG is useful when nuclear accidents occur. However, the people who escape from accident sites still need medical and economic assistance. Integrating the MEG with other emergency response systems to create an emergency response platform is necessary. In other words,
Conclusion
For nuclear accident emergency response, many countries stipulate a number of strategies to protect the public. However, the public does not have all of the resources needed when there is an evacuation from a nuclear accident site. After investigating several variants (e.g., the geographical recognition and operation devices), this study implemented mobile escape guidelines by integrating the geographic information and augmented reality techniques upon mobile phones. The main study outcomes
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank all members in the Research Center for Hazard Mitigation and Prevention, National Central University; the GIS Research Center, Feng-Chia University; and the Institute of Nuclear Energy Research, Atomic Energy Council, Executive Yuan. During the period of this study, the financial support came from NL1000375 and NCU100G901-11.
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