PetaBencana Case Study

PetaBencana is an applied research project originally supported by the University of Wollongong’s Global Challenges Program and a Twitter data grant. It brings together mobile mapping and local flood information for the city of Jakarta, Indonesia. The platform lets the 28 million citizens of Jakarta share real-time flood information in a part of the world increasingly affected by flooding. In addition to the collection and dissemination of information by community members through location-enabled mobile devices, researchers can complement existing manual water gauges with water-level-sensing devices to inexpensively increase monitoring across the waterway network in Jakarta.

• Need for immediate access to accurate, time-critical flood information anytime, anywhere.
• Ability to scale in order to meet peak demand during emergency situations.
• Ability to allow emergency-response organizations to securely input data into the platform.

• Uses AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to collect social media and flood-gauge data.
• Uses AWS IoT services to manage sensor devices and collect data from deployments in the field in Jakarta.
• Uses Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, and Amazon Route 53 to securely transmit data for mapping.

• Scalability and reliability: AWS automated failover capabilities and scalability provide continuity of service during traffic peaks in the midst of flood events. During the 2015-2016 monsoon, 23,000 people used the PetaBencana site, with 3,500 reports of flooding on social media and more than 1.6 million Twitter impressions.
• Cost management: PetaBencana’s platform can scale to handle high volumes of traffic during disaster situations without requiring expensive servers that sit idle during off-peak times.
• Security: Users can connect devices to AWS services securely to process data, and can enable applications to interact with devices even when they are offline.

• The PetaBencana team is now based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is preparing for the launch of PetaBencana.id, which will serve more cities, have a wider social media reach, pull from additional data sources, and utilize a new architecture.
• The new architecture uses Amazon CloudFront and Amazon API Gateway to improve the scalability and resilience of the site. In the future, API calls will be handled by AWS Lambda.
• The University of Wollongong will continue development on its IoT water-level sensors, leveraging solar power and power management to make the sensors suitable for long-term, wide-scale deployment in Jakarta and other cities.