In post-disaster scenarios, such as after floods, earthquakes, and in war zones, the cellular communication infrastructure may be destroyed or seriously disrupted. In such emergency scenarios, it becomes very important for first aid responders to communicate with other rescue teams in order to provide feedback to both the central office and the disaster survivors. To address this issue, rapidly deployable systems are required to re-establish connectivity and assist users and first responders in the region of incident. In this work, we describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of a rapidly deployable system for first response applications in post-disaster situations, named RDSP. The proposed system helps early rescue responders and victims by sharing their location information to remotely located servers by utilizing a novel routing scheme. This novel routing scheme consists of the Dynamic ID Assignment (DIA) algorithm and the Minimum Maximum Neighbor (MMN) algorithm. The DIA algorithm is used by relay devices to dynamically select their IDs on the basis of all the available IDs of networks. Whereas, the MMN algorithm is used by the client and relay devices to dynamically select their next neighbor relays for the transmission of messages. The RDSP contains three devices; the client device sends the victim’s location information to the server, the relay device relays information between client and server device, the server device receives messages from the client device to alert the rescue team. We deployed and evaluated our system in the outdoor environment of the university campus. The experimental results show that the RDSP system reduces the message delivery delay and improves the message delivery ratio with lower communication overhead.

Most people use maps for navigation. Geographic maps visually represent physical distance between locations. These maps sometimes provide a false impression of travel times. Two cities geographically close to each other might be “far apart” in terms of travel time because of slower connections, whereas two cities geographically distant might be “nearby” in terms of travel time because of faster connections. Under such circumstances, visualizing a transport network using time as a distance measure can make the transport network more understandable. This study integrates several (carto)graphic representations—a time line, a distance line, a time prism, a time cartogram, and a geographic map—in an interactive linked-views environment to model reachability in transport networks. A prototype is implemented in a web environment using D3.js. The implementation can be applied to any transport network. In this research, the approach is illustrated with railroad network data for the Dutch province of Overijssel. The solution provides an alternative and insightful perspective for analyzing the data. In addition to complementing a wide variety of methods to visualizing travel times, the approach could be applied in areas such as spatial analysis and transport planning.