A Smartphone Crowdsensing System Enabling Environmental Crowdsourcing for Municipality Resource Allocation with LSTM Stochastic Prediction

• Main Authors: Theodoros Anagnostopoulos, Theodoros Xanthopoulos, Yannis Psaromiligkos
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-07-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: smartphone crowdsensing; environmental crowdsourcing; edge mobile applications; stochastic prediction; LSTM; department resource allocation
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/14/3966

Resource allocation of the availability of certain departments for dealing with emergency recovery is of high importance in municipalities. Efficient planning for facing possible disasters in the coverage area of a municipality provides reassurance for citizens. Citizens can assist with such malfunctions by acting as human sensors at the edge of an infrastructure to provide instant feedback to the appropriate departments fixing the problems. However, municipalities have limited department resources to handle upcoming emergency events. In this study, we propose a smartphone crowdsensing system that is based on citizens’ reactions as human sensors at the edge of a municipality infrastructure to supplement malfunctions exploiting environmental crowdsourcing location-allocation capabilities. A long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network is incorporated to learn the occurrence of such emergencies. The LSTM is able to stochastically predict future emergency situations, acting as an early warning component of the system. Such a mechanism may be used to provide adequate department resource allocation to treat future emergencies.