Cloud asset for urban flood control Gangyan Xu, George Q. Huang ⇑ , Ji Fang HKU-ZIRI Lab for Physical Internet, Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region article info Article history: Received 1 September 2014 Received in revised form 15 January 2015 Accepted 17 January 2015 Available online xxxx Keywords: Cloud asset Smart object Cloud-based applications Mobile agent Urban flood control abstract The performance of physical assets has become a major determinant success factor for urban flood control. However, managing these assets is always challenging as there are a huge number of diverse assets involved, which are distributed throughout the city, and owned by different agencies. Aiming at improving the management efficiency of these assets, and ensuring their performance, this paper pro- poses the concept of cloud asset based on cloud computing, mobile agent, and various smart devices. Through hardware integration and software encapsulation, cloud asset could sense its real-time status, adapt to varied working scenarios, be controlled remotely, and shared among agencies. It enables accu- rate real-time control of every asset, and thus improves the management efficiency and effectiveness. This paper first presents the concept of cloud asset with its technical architecture, and then analyses the software agent model for cloud asset, which is the key enabler to realize UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) management of assets, and provides mobility and intelligence for them. After that, the framework of cloud asset-enabled workflow management is built, in which cloud asset could be easily found and dynamically invoked by different workflows. Finally, a demonstrative case is provided to verify the effec- tiveness of cloud asset. Ó 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd. 1. Introduction Urban flood control has attracted more and more attention in recent years since flood is becoming the most frequent and great- est natural disaster for urban areas, and usually causes severe impacts. Over 233 out of the 633 largest cities in the world are threatened by flood, affecting about 663 million inhabitants [1]. In China, during 2008 to 2010, at least 62% cities had encountered urban flood, and 137 cities were flooded for more than three times. According to the Flood Control and Draught Relief Headquarters of China, over 234 cities had been suffered from flood in 2013. The situation will become even worse in the future with the worldwide excessive urbanization and climate change [2]. To mitigate future flood damages in urban area, various measures have been taken out, such as river training, storm water diversion, flood forecasting, real-time warning, and emergency management. However, the effectiveness of these measures is always impeded by the poor performance of diverse physical assets involved, such as dams, sewers, pipes, pumps, hoisters, and sand- bags, which will then threaten the success of urban flood control [2]. In order to ensure the performance of these assets throughout the whole process of urban flood control, effective management of them is urgently needed. Currently, some attempts have also been made. For example, Malano et al. [3] identified the roles asset man- agement program (AMP) plays for irrigation and drainage infra- structure, and analyzed its investment requirements. Park and Kim [4] developed a data warehouse based decision support sys- tem for the management of sewer infrastructure. To monitor the condition of water pipeline and networks, Davis et al. [5] made a detailed analysis for the possible techniques, and Lau and Dwight [6] proposed a fuzzy-based decision support model. Nevertheless, as most of them are only focusing on a sub-set of assets in urban flood control and covering parts of their lifecycles, many problems remain unsolved, including how to get real-time data from differ- ent assets, make remote control of them, and optimize the usage throughout their whole lifecycles. Information technology provides an opportunity to solve these problems, and has been proved to be effective in many other fields. For example, radio frequency identification (RFID) could help asset managers to make asset tracking and monitoring. It has already been widely used in hospitals to improve the asset management efficiency and reduce the cost [7]. As the enabling technology to collect real-world information, wireless sensor network (WSN) has also been widely used in asset management [8]. In addition, agent technology, which could make the management process http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aei.2015.01.006 1474-0346/Ó 2015 Published by Elsevier Ltd. ⇑ Corresponding author at: HKU-ZIRI Lab for Physical Internet, Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Tel.: +852 28592591; fax: +852 28586535. E-mail address: gqhuang@hku.hk (G.Q. Huang). Advanced Engineering Informatics xxx (2015) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Advanced Engineering Informatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/aei Please cite this article in press as: G. Xu et al., Cloud asset for urban flood control, Adv. Eng. Informat. (2015), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aei.2015.01.006