Network failure detection system for traffic control using social information in large-scale disasters

When the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred in 2011, it was difficult to grasp all network conditions immediately using only information from sensors because the damage was considerably heavy and the severe congestion control state occurred. Moreover, at the time of the earthquake, telephone and Internet could not be used in many cases, although Twitter was still available. In an emergency, such as an earthquake, users take an interest in the network condition and provide information on networks proactively through social media. Therefore, the collective intelligence of Twitter is suitable as a means of information detection complementary to conventional observation. In this paper, we propose a network failure detection system that detects candidates of failures of telephony infrastructure by utilizing the collective intelligence of social networking services. By using this system, more information, which is useful for traffic control, can be detected.