Wireless Sensor Network Based Flood Prediction Using Belief Rule Based Expert System

Sammanfattning: Flood is one of the most devastating natural disasters. It is estimated that flooding from sea level rise will cause one trillion USD to major coastal cities of the world by the year 2050. Flood not only destroys the economy, but it also creates physical and psychological sufferings for the human and destroys infrastructures. Disseminating flood warnings and evacuating people from the flood-affected areas help to save human life. Therefore, predicting flood will help government authorities to take necessary actions to evacuate humans and arrange relief for the people.This licentiate thesis focuses on four different aspects of flood prediction using wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Firstly, different WSNs, protocols related to WSN, and backhaul connectivity in the context of predicting flood were investigated. A heterogeneous WSN network for flood prediction was proposed.Secondly, data coming from sensors contain anomaly due to different types of uncertainty, which hampers the accuracy of flood prediction. Therefore, anomalous data needs to be filtered out. A novel algorithm based on belief rule base for detecting the anomaly from sensor data has been proposed in this thesis.Thirdly, predicting flood is a challenging task as it involves multi-level factors, which cannot be measured with 100% certainty. Belief rule based expert systems (BRBESs) can be considered to handle the complex problem of this nature as they address different types of uncertainty. A web based BRBES was developed for predicting flood. This system provides better usability, more computational power to handle larger numbers of rule bases and scalability by porting it into a web-based solution. To improve the accuracy of flood prediction, a learning mechanism for multi-level BRBES was proposed. Furthermore, a comparison between the proposed multi-level belief rule based learning algorithm and other machine learning techniques including Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), Support Vector Machine (SVM) based regression, and Linear Regression has been performed.In the light of the research findings of this thesis, it can be argued that flood prediction can be accomplished more accurately by integrating WSN and BRBES.