Development of Failure Detection System for Network Control using Collective Intelligence of Social Networking Service in Large-Scale Disasters

When the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred in 2011, it was difficult to immediately grasp all telecommunications network conditions using only information from network monitoring devices because the damage was considerably heavy and a severe congestion control state occurred. Moreover, at the time of the earthquake, telephone and e-mail services could not be used in many cases, although social networking services (SNSs) were still available. In an emergency, such as an earthquake, users proactively convey information on telecommunications network conditions through SNSs. Therefore, the collective intelligence of SNSs is suitable as a means of information detection complementary to conventional observation through network monitoring devices. In this paper, we propose a network failure detection system that detects telephony failures with a high degree of accuracy by using the collective intelligence of Twitter, one of the most widely used SNSs. We also show that network control can be performed automatically and autonomically using information on telecommunications network conditions detected with our system.