2019 Volume 17 Issue 1 Pages 31-40
Road administrators have to gather information about locations where roads are damaged and consolidate it when disaster occurred. The information is used to close/restrict traffic, set up diversions and so on. The information is also important for other organizations and road users to decide which path to use in transportation/transfer. However, there are no single way which can express locations on roads all over Japan easily. In addition, the information should be consolidated in quite limited time in a disaster, sometimes by staffs who are dispatched from other area/organizations and unfamiliar with places where they are. Based on the conditions above, damaged road locations are expressed by route' name in combination with places' name or various kinds of landmarks (geographic identifiers).
Information technology which can calculate coordinate as latitude/longitude from places' name is called geocoding. Information systems using geocoding, called geocoder, provided until now are not suitable for locations on roads. Thus, it takes a lot of labors to specify locations on roads because we have to refer to various roadmaps and related route' name and geographic identifiers manually. In this study, we used road geocoder, which can calculate locations on roads automatically through route' name and geographic identifiers, to specify locations of damaged road in July 2017 Kyushu northern heavy rain disaster. As a result, road geocoder can calculate 86% of input data in one second per data.
