College of Engineering Unit:
The project, GIS-based Analysis Tool for Disaster Recovery, references a tool-set of software interfaces which have been developed by us to help Emergency Managers in planning recovery efforts and forming evacuation plans in the event of and in preparation for a natural disaster. The tool-set includes multiple ArcGIS Pro Toolboxes for GIS experts to extend their tool-chains in their analysis of natural disasters, as well as a stand-alone web-map for all to use in calculating routes that avoid geographic hazards.
The Python toolbox extensions developed for ArcGIS Pro consist of a Hazard Routing toolbox to help calculate routes between locations while avoiding hazardous terrain perimeters, and a Closest Facilities toolbox to determine the most efficient set of routes between two distinct sets of points. These toolboxes rely on public APIs to perform the routing calculations, with the Closest Facilities toolbox relying on ArcGIS’s Closest Facilities API and the Hazard Routing toolbox relying on a deployed instance of the Open Routing Service configured with network data from Open Street Maps for the Pacific Northwest, which we deployed on a cloud virtual machine.
Finally, the publicly accessible web-map allows users to access the Python toolboxes and their API components without relying on an installation of ArcGIS Pro. The web-map relies largely on the JavaScript library Leaflet to display a map and calculation results to a user, as well as a simple Flask-based backend to handle the user’s requests. We’ve configured and deployed the web-map on a cloud server configured complete with a registered domain name and TLS support (so it’s accessible via https) viewable at https://map.safer-ways.com/.