A cost-effective underwater communication infrastructure for near-field tsunami detection

This paper explores the potential use of underwater sensors, coupled with submarine fiber optic, for tsunami early detection. More specifically, the infrastructure will be designed to deal with near field tsunami, whose source is within about 100 km from the coast. To effectively support near-field tsunami disaster management and execution of the evacuation plan, the infrastructure must deliver tsunami alerts in a timely and reliably fashion. Furthermore, the acquisition, deployment and maintenance cost of the infrastructure must be kept at a minimum. This is necessary for the infrastructure to be a viable solution for near-field tsunami detection in economically challenged countries. To address these design challenges, this paper develops an optimization framework for proposed infrastructure to derive cost-effective, reliable, and timely near-field tsunami early detection. This framework incorporates Bellhop acoustic propagation model and sea environment factors to obtain realistic results. A heuristic approach is then proposed to derive near optimal, feasible and cost-effective infrastructure for near-field tsunami detection. To assess the performance of the proposed heuristic, a similar approach derived using nonlinear programming based approach and a comparative analysis is carried out. The results show that the proposed heuristic exhibits similar performance as the nonlinear programming based approach, but at a reduced computational cost. A case study is also carried out to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed infrastructure in realistic environments, under different design constraints and operational scenarios.