Japan's KDDI has had its proposal for the development of an integrated disaster response system for city, town and village municipalities accepted for use by the Japanese government.
The proposal has been accepted under the Cabinet Office Strategic Innovation Program (SIP). It will involve advancing to the next stage a joint research program conducted between KDDI and seven institutions.
The research and development effort concentrates on the implementation of technologies including IoT, 5G and AI to develop solutions to common challenges associated with evacuation in disaster scenarios.
Under the model, information from a range of IoT sensors and other inputs will be evaluated using AI to achieve instantaneous decisions on evacuation and local responses to disasters.
KDDI said the system aims to achieve a “five zero” disaster prevention and mitigation program – zero information loss, zero announcement delays, zero evacuation delay, zero local response failure, and ideally zero casualties.
The operator aims to make the system operational this year, and has proposed to build it up progressively across 1,700 local city, town and village communities nationwide.