Cloud-based smart asset management for urban flood control.

Urban flooding, frequently occurring in metropolitan areas, is one of the largest disasters worldwide. Albeit a large number of approaches and Enterprise Information Systems EISs have been designed for urban flood control, the ineffective management of physical assets has greatly impeded their deployment. Managing diverse physical assets is critical in urban flood control. Challenges exist in sharing assets and services between agencies, and ensuring real-time and flexible decision supports. This paper proposes a cloud-based asset management platform. Cloud technology is adopted for processing the huge amount of data collected by various physical assets and for providing flexible access interfaces. Service-oriented methods are applied to facilitate the sharing of assets and services and to enable the development of flexible and scalable Decision Support Systems DSSs. Moreover, the concept of smart asset is introduced for remote real-time data collection, and the corresponding software agent model is developed to wrap these diverse assets, realising the UPnP Universal Plug and Play working mode. Finally, a case study on the urban flood control process of Guangqumen Bridge in Beijing is provided to illustrate the asset management processes of the proposed platform.