An edge intelligence empowered flooding process prediction using Internet of things in smart city

Floods result in substantial damage throughout the world every year. Accurate predictions of floods can significantly alleviate casualties and property losses. However, due to the complexity of hydrology process especially in a city with complicated pipe network, the accuracy of traditional flood forecasting models suffer from the performance degradation with the increasing of required prediction period. In the work, based on the collected historical data of Xixian City, Henan Province, China, using the Internet of Things system (IoT) in 2011-2018, a Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (BiGRU) multi-step flood prediction model with attention mechanism is proposed. In our model, the attention mechanism is used to automatically adjust the matching degree between the input features and output. Besides, we use a bidirectional GRU model, which can process the input sequence from two directions of time series (chronologically and antichronologically), then merge their representations together. Compared with the prediction model using Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), our method can generate better prediction result, as can be seen from the arrival time error and peak error of floods during multi-step predictions.