Emergency management systems using mobile cloud computing: A survey

Among today's rapidly evolving technologies, artificial intelligence plays a significant role in making decisions by a system without any human intervention. An Emergency Management System (EMS) is a decision support system where emergencies such as tsunami, landslide, fire, cyclone, and electrical short circuits can be prevented with prior detection and can be addressed immediately in an efficient way after the emergency occurred. Automation of EMS can avoid or manage multiple emergencies, which alternatively can save lives, economy, and environment. Quality demand response with fast data transfer, error minimized computation, and effective resource utilization is very much essential while developing the EMSs. This will provide a bridge between the technology and emergency responders. Resource-limited smart devices can be made rich in computational behavior by outsourcing their requirements such as storage, virtual servers, and web services using Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC). In this work, we have done a detailed survey on both MCC applications and EMS applications proposed in the literature, and we have also identified the design challenges handled in both MCC and EMS applications. We have presented the design challenges and possible solutions for development of EMS using MCC. We propose an architecture for building an automated EMS using MCC. Finally, we conclude the paper with specific future directions.