Multicloud-Based Evacuation Services for Emergency Management

A smart evacuation needs a scalable and flexible system to provide service in both emergency and normal situations. A single cloud service is usually limited to support scaling up requirements in an emergency, especially one with a large geographic scope. In this article, the authors propose MCES, a multicloud architecture that deploys smart evacuation services in multiple cloud providers and that can tolerant more pressure than single cloud-based services. This system maintains basic service to support monitoring, but during an emergency, visits to the service will scale up enormously, which means MDSE must support a rapid scaling up of service capacity in a short time. The authors use a three-layer cloud instance management to support rapid capacity scaling in MCES. By conducting extensive simulations, the authors demonstrate that their proposed MCES significantly outperforms single cloud solutions under various emergency settings.