Common alerting protocol message broker for Last-Mile Hazard Warning System in Sri Lanka : an essential component

Abstract

Last-Mile Hazard Warning System (LM-HWS) is an Innovation aimed at providing the Communities in Sri Lanka a system to receive hazard information for early warnings. A major component of the LM-HWS is the Hazard Information Hub (HIH) disseminating CAP Message in the 3 national languages: Sinhala, Tamil, and English. These CAP Messages are sent to the Last-Mile Communities in the content-forms of audio and text. Reliability of the HIH performance must not be any less than a 95%. Such a high reliability is expected in order to give the Community First-Responders time to complete their Emergency Response Plans. The Live Exercises gave the HIH a Reliability score of 78%. For example an event such as the December 2004 Tsunami that had a minimal 90 minute duration between time of hazard starting and the time of impacting Sri Lanka; with a 78% Reliability, the function: Relaying of Message to the Last-Mile alone would take 20 minutes. Analysis also shows the Reliability to drop significantly when the combination of SISO relaying Applications increase. A MIMO Alerting Application such as a Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) Message Broker would increase the performance of the HIH and give the hazard impacting Communities additional time to execute their ERPs.