Disaster Evacuation Guidance Using Opportunistic Communication: The Potential for Opportunity-Based Service

In recent years, as a practical use of Delay Tolerant Network and Mobile Opportunistic Network, disaster evacuation guidance effective against situations of large-scale urban disasters have been studied. We have proposed a disaster evacuation guidance using opportunistic communication where evacuees gather location information of impassable and congested roads by disaster into their smartphones by themselves, and also share the information with each other by short-range wireless communication between nearby smartphones. Our guidance is designed not only to navigate evacuating crowds to refuges, but also to rapidly aggregate the disaster information. On the other hand, the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011 taught us a lesson: the only helpful services in disaster situations are services that are daily used by everyone. Inversely services prepared only for disaster situations have never been used in a disaster situation because of lack of maintenance or unawareness by ignorance. To effectively utilise our evacuation guidance, therefore, some service using opportunistic communication should be firstly widespread across the world as an infrastructure and everyone naturally receives much benefit from the service in daily life. In this chapter we consider a possibility of the service, which we call Opportunity-based Service (OBS). We discuss some practical usages not only for disaster situations, but also for daily life, for example, an autonomous human navigation avoiding congestion by crowds. Through reviewing our past works, we try to foresee a possible next-generation information communication technology regarding Big Data, IoT, and pervasive computing on smart environments.