A deployed multi agent system for meteorological alerts

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has a requirement for complex and evolving systems to manage its weather forecasting, monitoring and alerts. This paper describes a system that monitors in real time the current terminal area forecasts (forecasts for areas around airports) and alerts forecasters to inconsistencies between these and observations obtained from automatic weather station (AWS) data. The contributions of the paper are a description of the overall architecture including legacy components, and the mechanisms that have been used to interface to legacy components; a description of an inferencing mechanism, available in recent versions of the JACK Intelligent Agents toolkit which has been particularly useful in some of the reasoning needed in this application; and a detailed description of the architecture for data sharing and data management. The system is currently deployed and a project is underway to extend this to a much larger system

From Sensor to Observation Web with Environmental Enablers in the Future Internet

This paper outlines the grand challenges in global sustainability research and the objectives of the FP7 Future Internet PPP program within the Digital Agenda for Europe. Large user communities are generating significant amounts of valuable environmental observations at local and regional scales using the devices and services of the Future Internet. These communities’ environmental observations represent a wealth of information which is currently hardly used or used only in isolation and therefore in need of integration with other information sources. Indeed, this very integration will lead to a paradigm shift from a mere Sensor Web to an Observation Web with semantically enriched content emanating from sensors, environmental simulations and citizens. The paper also describes the research challenges to realize the Observation Web and the associated environmental enablers for the Future Internet. Such an environmental enabler could for instance be an electronic sensing device, a web-service application, or even a social networking group affording or facilitating the capability of the Future Internet applications to consume, produce, and use environmental observations in cross-domain applications. The term ?envirofied? Future Internet is coined to describe this overall target that forms a cornerstone of work in the Environmental Usage Area within the Future Internet PPP program. Relevant trends described in the paper are the usage of ubiquitous sensors (anywhere), the provision and generation of information by citizens, and the convergence of real and virtual realities to convey understanding of environmental observations. The paper addresses the technical challenges in the Environmental Usage Area and the need for designing multi-style service oriented architecture. Key topics are the mapping of requirements to capabilities, providing scalability and robustness with implementing context aware information retrieval. Another essential research topic is handling data fusion and model based computation, and the related propagation of information uncertainty. Approaches to security, standardization and harmonization, all essential for sustainable solutions, are summarized from the perspective of the Environmental Usage Area. The paper concludes with an overview of emerging, high impact applications in the environmental areas concerning land ecosystems (biodiversity), air quality (atmospheric conditions) and water ecosystems (marine asset management)

Engage D5.6 Thematic challenge briefing notes (1st and 2nd releases)

Engage identified four thematic challenges to address research topics not contemporaneously (sufficiently) addressed by SESAR. This deliverable serves primarily as a record of the two sets of released thematic challenge briefing notes

Scaling up climate services for farmers: Mission Possible. Learning from good practice in Africa and South Asia

This report presents lessons learned from 18 case studies across Africa and South Asia that have developed and delivered weather and climate information and related advisory services for smallholder farmers. The case studies and resulting lessons provide insights on what will be needed to build effective national systems for the production, delivery, communication and evaluation of operational climate services for smallholder farmers across the developing world. The case studies include two national-scale programmes that have been the subject of recent assessments: India’s Integrated Agrometeorological Advisory Service (AAS) Program, which provides tailored weather-based agrometeorological advisories to millions of farmers; and Mali’s Projet d’Assistance Agro-meteorologique au Monde Rural, which provided innovative seasonal agrometeorological advisory services for smallholder farmers and 16 less mature initiatives operating at a pilot scale across Africa and South Asia. The case studies were examined from the standpoint of how they address five key challenges for scaling up effective climate services for farmers: salience, access, legitimacy, equity and integration

Augmenting security event information with contextual data to improve the detection capabilities of a SIEM

The increasing number of cyber security breaches have revealed a need for proper cyber security measures. The emergence of the internet and the increase in overall connectivity means that data is more easily accessible and available. Using the available data in a security context may provide a system with an external contextual insight such as environmental awareness or current affair awareness. A security information and event management (SIEM) system is a security system that correlates security event information from surrounding systems and decides whether the surrounding environment (possibly an enterprise's network) is vulnerable or even under attack by a malicious person whether they be internal (authorised) or external (unauthorised). In this thesis, the aim is to provide such a system with con- text by adding non-security related information from surrounding available sources known as context information feeds. Contextual information feeds are added to the SIEM and tested using randomised events. There are various context information types used in this thesis, namely: social media, meteorological, calendar information and terror threat level. The SIEM is tested with each contextual data feed active and the results are recorded. The testing shows that the addition of contextual data feeds actively affects the sensitivity of OSSIM and hence results in higher alarms raised during elevated context triggered states. The system showed a greater and deeper visibility of its surrounding environment and hence an improved detection capability

Four paradoxes of the user-provider interface: A responsible innovation framework for sea ice services

In the Arctic region, sea ice retreat as a decadal-scale crisis is creating a challenging environment for navigating long-term sustainability. Innovations in sea ice services can help marine users to anticipate sea ice concentration, thickness and motion, plan ahead, as well as increase the safety and sustainability of marine operations. Increasingly however, policy makers and information service providers confront paradoxical decision-making contexts in which contradictory solutions are needed to manage uncertainties across different spatial and temporal scales. This article proposes a forward-looking sea ice services framework that acknowledges four paradoxes pressuring sea ice service provision: the paradoxes of performing, contradictory functions embedded in sea ice services, contradicting desired futures and the paradox of responsible innovation. We draw on the results from a multi-year co-production process of (sub)seasonal sea ice services structured around scoping interviews, workshops and a participatory scenario process with representatives of marine sectors, fishers, hunters, metservice providers, and policy experts. Our proposed framework identifies institutionalized coproduction processes, enhanced decision support, paradoxical thinking and dimensions of responsible innovation as tactics necessary to address existing tensions in sea ice services. We highlight the role of socio-economic scenarios in implementing these tactics in support of responsible innovation in sea ice social-ecological systems. The article concludes with a discussion of questions around equity and responsibility raised by the ultimate confirmation that enhanced information, data infrastructures, and service provisions will not benefit all actors equally.</p

Enhanced Prediction of Network Attacks Using Incomplete Data

For years, intrusion detection has been considered a key component of many organizations’ network defense capabilities. Although a number of approaches to intrusion detection have been tried, few have been capable of providing security personnel responsible for the protection of a network with sufficient information to make adjustments and respond to attacks in real-time. Because intrusion detection systems rarely have complete information, false negatives and false positives are extremely common, and thus valuable resources are wasted responding to irrelevant events. In order to provide better actionable information for security personnel, a mechanism for quantifying the confidence level in predictions is needed. This work presents an approach which seeks to combine a primary prediction model with a novel secondary confidence level model which provides a measurement of the confidence in a given attack prediction being made. The ability to accurately identify an attack and quantify the confidence level in the prediction could serve as the basis for a new generation of intrusion detection devices, devices that provide earlier and better alerts for administrators and allow more proactive response to events as they are occurring

Air traffic control using separation algorithm based on rules of the air

Avoiding collisions is one of the main tasks of air traffic control. The rapid increase in air traffic and its continued growth raises the issue of assisting air traffic controllers in high complex traffic scenarios, where safety and efficiency cannot be compromised. Predictions estimated for the future of several decades¿ state that the current air traffic management system will not be able to withstand this increase in demand for air transport with the required levels of safety, efficiency and sustainability. Air traffic management is changing faster and faster towards more advanced and efficient technology, with the integration of automated support tools to assist air traffic controllers. This document presents a method to enhance the performance and efficiency of the air traffic controllers¿ tasks: monitor and manage all aircraft flying through the airspace sector, performed in a centralised way. The objective is design a separation algorithm based on the general Rules of the Air. To achieve the goal of the project, Remain Well Clear and Closest Point of Approach concepts have been used as other sources of information. The policy algorithm is simulated in a controlled simulation environment. Regarding the results obtained at the end of this project, a reduction of the conflicts of a 99,41% is achieved compared with a situation without applying any instructions. The results of this project also include a sensitive analysis of the tuning of parameters. The performance of the policy model could be upgraded in the future applying Artificial Intelligence, so conflicts can be addressed in a much more efficient and accurate way.Objectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::9 - Indústria, Innovació i Infraestructur

Engage D2.6 Annual combined thematic workshops progress report (series 2)

The preparation, organisation and conclusions from the thematic challenge workshops, two ad hoc technical workshops, a technical session on data and a MET/ENV workshop held in 2019 and 2020 are described. Partly due to Covid-19, two of the 2020 thematic challenge workshops scheduled to take place at the end of 2020 were re-scheduled to January 2021. We also report on the preparation for these two workshops, while the conclusions will be included in the next corresponding deliverable