Bahaba: A disaster management route generator for mobile systems

Natural disasters frequently occur around the world, especially in the recent years. A process called Disaster Management was introduced and implemented to cope with the coming, the occurrence and the aftermath of disasters more effectively. It makes use of a cycle to illustrate its operations and has 6 phases separated into 2 categories (Miththapala, 2008). There are already several software that are designed to implement Disaster Management, such as My-Disaster Droid, USHAHIDI and Sahana which use the current Internet and mobile technologies to provide the implementation on stationary and portable devices. However, disaster management in mobile systems lack feedback from the system to the user. Also, the software mentioned do not consider the current condition of the community. Damage paths were not considered because their main function is to provide an optimized route. This research aims to create a route generation system for mobile systems via SMS with the target community, Lian, Batangas. The generated routes shall consider the current conditions of the roads whether it is passable or not. The system focuses on the Response and Mitigation phases by responding to the SMS requests with another SMS containing instructions on the shortest path, generated with the A* algorithm, to the nearest safe place in the community. The SMS requests and response are handled with the Globe SMS/MMS API and must follow the proper SMS format in order for it to be processed. The system is able to generate a route that is the shortest path to safe places and send this to users with some delay, which averages to a minute