The rising role of big data analytics and IoT in disaster management: Recent advances, taxonomy and prospects

The recent development of big data analytics (BDA) and the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies create a huge opportunity for both disaster management systems and disaster-related authorities (emergency responders, police, public health, and fire departments) to acquire state-of-the-art assistance and improved insights for accurate and timely decision-making. The motivation behind this research is to pave the way for effective utilization of the available opportunities that the BDA and IoT collaboratively offer to predict, understand and monitor disaster situations. Most of the conventional disaster management systems lack the support for multiple new data sources and real-time big data processing tools that can assist decision makers with quick and accurate results. This paper highlights the importance of BDA and IoT for disaster management and investigates recent studies directed towards the same. We classify a thematic taxonomy with several related attributes and inspect the prevalent solutions to propose a conceptual reference model for the deployment of BDA- and IoT-based disaster management environments. The reference model with its proposed integrated parameters can provide guidelines to harvest, transmit, manage, and analyze disaster data from various data sources to deliver updated and valuable information for disaster management. We also enumerate some important use cases from a disaster management perspective. Finally, we highlight the main research challenges that need to be addressed in such an important field of research.