Design and Development of a Fire Detection System Using Chaining of Geoprocessing Services

Rapidly discovering, sharing, integrating and applying geospatial information are key issues in the domain of emergency response and disaster management. Due to the distributed nature of data and processing resources in disaster management, utilizing a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to take advantages of workflow of services provides an efficient, flexible and reliable implementation to encounter different hazardous situation. The implementation specification of the Web Processing Service (WPS) has guided geospatial data processing in SOA to become a widely accepted solution for processing remotely sensed data on the web. This standard is a generic interface without any restriction on supporting any specific process. It is possible to integrate different geoprocessing services in an individual WPS service and expose it as a single web service. This paper presents an architecture design based on OGC web services for automated workflow of acquisition, processing remotely sensed data, detecting fire and sending notifications to the authorities. A basic architecture and its building blocks are represented using web-based processing of remote sensing imageries utilizing MODIS data. As a framework for this application, we consider a generic architecture, which consists of several components. These components are divided into layers according to the types of functionality they provide. A core module is provided to manage the interactions between different layers and components. To achieve the interoperability issue, OGC standard interfaces are utilized for storing, processing and representing remote-sensing data. A workflow of distributed processes are used for hot pixel detection using MODIS data to implement the feasibility of the proposed architecture. A composition of WPS processes, in a centralized opaque pattern, is proposed as a WPS service to extract fire events. The workflow includes several processes such as pre-processing of data, radiance number calculation, brightness temperature process, fire event rules computations. The paper highlights the role of WPS as a middleware interface in the domain of geospatial web service technology that can be used to invoke a large variety of geoprocessing operations and chaining of other web services as an engine of composition. The usage of available data and processing resources on a flexible infrastructure as a composite service is one of the benefits of service oriented architecture that provides a higher level of functionalities and applications. The applicability of proposed architecture by a real world fire event detection and notification use case is evaluated. For the implementation of described system, open source web service software and java technology have been used. OGC standard interfaces of data access services, Web Coverage Service (WCS) and Web Feature Service (WFS), have been used to store and retrieve required data in a standard way. To notify the realized events of fire hazards to the authorities the standard implementation specification of OGC, Web Notification Service (WNS), was used to provide alerts in different protocols of communication. A GeoPortal client was developed to manage data, metadata, processes, and authorities alongside the mapping of results of fire event detection processes on satellite imageries. Investigating feasibility and benefits of proposed framework exposes that this framework could be extended and reuse the components of this architecture for wide area of geospatial applications specially disaster management and environmental monitoring.