This article is an introduction to a community-led open-source critical asset management project called CAMS. The article provides some context to the project origin as well as some examples of the application schema and queries to provide an understanding of its build. It is based on a graph database and is aimed at helping nations, cities, and communities build their climate resilience. We're seeking contributors to help, so if you want to cut to the chase, visit the CAMS GitHub Repo.
The origins of CAMS
Climate change is warming the sea’s temperatures and this is causing dire troubles for island nations, cities, and communities. Tropical storms are becoming more frequent and ferocious and battering these places with merciless force.
The Commonwealth of Dominica is one example of having to suffer the consequences of mankind’s follies. In September 2017, they were battered by Hurricane Maria, a category five hurricane. With winds of 160 miles per hour, it destroyed 90 percent of the Island’s structures, caused $1.3 billion in loss, equivalent to 224% of Dominica’s GDP, and resulted in the loss of 65 lives.
Dominica’s Prime Minister, Roosevelt Skerrit, sent live updates via Facebook as the storm savaged the Island in the dead of night,
“The winds are merciless! We shall survive by the grace of God!”
Thankfully escaping unharmed, Prime Minister Skerrit addressed the United Nations in a heartfelt appeal for assistance to get the Island back on its feet,
“I come to you straight from the front line of the war on climate change.
“In the past, we would prepare for one heavy storm a year. Now, thousands of storms form on a breeze in the mid-Atlantic and line up to pound us with maximum force and fury.”
Dominica vowed to look climate change in the eye and set about becoming the world’s first climate-resilient nation.
A voluntary team put together by the United Nations
Dominica’s Department of Planning, Department of Industry and Commerce, and the specially created Climate Execution Agency for Dominica began work to build their resilience to climate change.
The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction leaned on the support of their private-sector advisory group, ARISE-US. ARISE-US is part of the ARISE Global Network, a team of private-sector volunteers helping nations big and small prevent disasters so their enterprises and communities can thrive. They have vast experience in helping nations become climate resilient so began the process of fact-finding to determine how to help Dominica’s quest to become the world’s first climate-resilient nation.
The problem to solve
As you might imagine, Dominica is experienced in dealing with extreme weather events. Hurricane Maria was devastating due to its force and the fact that it escalated from a category two hurricane to cat five in a few hours, but they were hit in 2010, 2013, and 2015 by major storms so they are well-positioned to help save lives by ensuring shelter and water in the aftermath of disasters.
However, it quickly became apparent that what was missing was knowledge. Shared knowledge about their critical assets. Aside from the destruction caused by Maria, critical asset failures caused delays in getting the economy going again, for example, four months after the hurricane, 90 percent of the population had no electricity.
The Island’s critical assets, such as hospitals, electricity, water, sanitation, transportation, and communications, are run by a multitude of governments and private entities. Information about these assets is also stored across different formats such as spreadsheets and word documents and there is no central repository for first responders and disaster planners to work from.
Almost as important as understanding the critical assets that make Dominica function are the relationships between them. If one fails, what does it impact, and if the impacted asset fails what does that affect? The cascading failure chain.
By understanding its critical assets and cascading failure chains, Dominica can plan for, and respond to extreme weather events with greater accuracy to minimize the impact of events such as hurricanes.
Relationships are made for knowledge graphs
ARISE-US built a team of technical volunteers to help them develop an application to help Dominica plan for and respond to extreme weather events. The team included a diverse and complementary range of skills for the task, including:
- BGC Engineering - An international consulting firm that provides professional services in applied earth sciences.
- Verses Labs - Providing enterprises, organizations, and governments with an extensive suite of integrated technologies that offer powerful spatial rights management.
- Datacequia - Consultants specializing in the use of data to drive understanding and insights.
- TerminusDB - An open-source document graph database company, specializing in building collaborative data applications using TerminusDB and TerminusX.
The team started with research and worked extensively with Dominica to build on the foundations laid by ARISE-US. Through whiteboard sessions and hackathons, the technical specifications for the application were developed to build an application to provide value to Dominica to help them plan, mitigate, and respond to disasters.
The critical asset management system, known as CAMS, is built upon TerminusDB which is a document graph database. Essentially, JSON documents are nodes in the graph and the edges connect documents together to create the relationships that drive the application’s functionality.
Using graph database technology for the CAMS project is the logical way forward as graphs are perfect for building and understanding relationships between things and as we’ve touched upon already, the relationships between different assets and the types of events that could impact them are the root of the problem CAMS is addressing.
The image above illustrates how the graph can combine edges and document properties within queries to provide richer functionality, for example, an asset property that states it is only vulnerable to specific events, such as flooding, in an area, at a particular severity level. The edges of the asset will then state that said asset is in an area, which is linked to an event, which is in turn linked to a variety of severities. Users can then see if a flood occurs in an area, which assets are affected, and go a level further by toggling with the severity of flooding to see the actual impact and then the cascading asset failure chain downstream.
MVP and Dominica Use Cases
The CAMS team has built the MVP for Dominica over the past couple of months, but there is still much to be done to provide a richer user experience and help Dominica, and other cities, island nations, and communities use it to build their resilience to climate change.
An important factor is to be able to give users a UI that enables them to add, edit, and remove assets, and create the edges of the graph. This essentially lets users state what assets are dependent on each other. As users are not technically oriented, this all needs to be achieved in the UI and enable all of the stakeholders to contribute by combining their own areas of expertise to build the linked chain of assets collaboratively for the common good.
You can see videos of CAMS and get more information about the process of building the critical asset management system on TerminusDB’s website.
To give you an idea of what CAMS is used for, here are some scenarios:
Planning
Pre hurricane season, the disaster planning groups have decided upon shelters and the mobile assets that will be needed for storms, generators, and portable water supplies for instance. These assets are added to the map and the relevant links and information is included.
CAMS operators can see what the shelters are dependent on and can plan for emergency food, water, and sanitation based on any likely failures upstream.
Impending danger
Hurricane season has hit and a category 3 hurricane is making its way to strike. CAMS operators can use the system to see what assets are likely to be impacted by a cat 3 storm, pull a list of asset owners, and begin the communication process to warn them and arrange contingency plans.
Asset vulnerability
Say, for example, a communications tower was due for repair, but the wrong parts were shipped. The repair crew onsite contacts the operator and informs them that the communication tower cannot be repaired and will likely fail due to no backup power.
The CAMS operator can then select the asset on the map, view the failure chain, and contact the relevant asset owners to warn them of the potential downtime in service.
Post-disaster mitigation
Islands such as Dominica rely on funding from various sources to help them improve the climate resilience of their assets, users can prioritize the most critical assets and print maps of the cascading failure chains to support grant applications.
Open source for good
The CAMS project is open source and is being provided as a free service to those who need to build their climate resilience. The MVP has been launched, but there is a lot of work to do to provide even more functionality, such as graph analytics to help nations analyze historical responses, automated alerts, and mobile applications that function offline when power and connectivity cannot be guaranteed.
If you’re interested in getting involved in an open-source product for good, check out the CAMS website and GitHub repo for more information.
Top comments (1)
Would love to contribute!