On the positioning of emergencies detection units based on geospatial data of urban response centres

Urban areas have been subject to emergency situations with different causes and sometimes dramatic consequences. With the advent of smart cities technologies, multi-emergency detection units could be conceived and implemented taking advantage of affordable sensing technologies and efficient decision algorithms, allowing quick and distributed detection of emergencies. However, a recurrent problem has been the positioning and further deployment of such detection units in a way that the particularities of each target city are properly considered. In this sense, this article proposes the processing of geospatial data about existing urban infrastructure associated with some critical response after an emergency is detected, selecting hospitals, police stations, fire departments, and metro stations, in the target city. These infrastructures are then exploited to define the novel concept of mitigation zones, which indirectly express the perceived level of urban resilience to emergencies. Then, four positioning algorithms are proposed to exploit the mitigation zones considering a defined set of available detection units for deployment. Since the proposed approach is valid for any city, provided that geospatial data is available, it could be largely adopted to support different smart city systems, potentially bringing significant results in this area. •The positioning of emergencies detection units in cities has been a challenging task.•Some mathematical elements are defined based on geospatial data from open databases.•Distances to urban response centres are used to compute the risk level of each area.•Four positioning algorithms are proposed to exploit the risk levels of mitigation zones.•Experimental results for the cities of Paris and Porto are presented.