Event-Based Digital-Twin Model for Emergency Management

Abstract

Critical infrastructures are required to be monitored and eventually rescued, for example, due to natural and/or man-made disasters. These control activities are among the fundamental tasks of emergency management systems. We consider distributed digital-twin-based control architectural styles as natural candidates for structuring emergency management systems. Due to their physically distributed nature, critical infrastructures and the associated emergency management systems are inevitably linked with Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Emergency management activities, however, require domain-specific GIS data models and event-based platforms to support digital-twin-based control. Unfortunately, current GIS systems are not expressive enough to fulfill these requirements. Moreover, due to the distributed and heterogeneous nature of such digital-twin-based architectures and the lack of standards, preserving the consistency of data can be difficult. To overcome the expressivity problem of the current GIS systems, this chapter extends the GIS system CityGML with a set of new abstractions. Data inconsistency problem is addressed by a novel architecture, which includes an atomic publisher-subscriber protocol and an event-based layer on the top of a GIS database. The architecture is simulated and verified by a model-checker. © 2024 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.