Event-Cloud Platform to Support Decision- Making in Emergency Management

The challenge of this paper is to underline the capability of an Event-Cloud Platform to support efficiently an emergency situation. We chose to focus on a nuclear crisis use case. The proposed approach consists in modeling the business processes of crisis response on the one hand, and in supporting the orchestration and execution of these processes by using an Event-Cloud Platform on the other hand. This paper shows how the use of Event-Cloud techniques can support crisis management stakeholders by automatizing non-value added tasks and by directing decision- makers on what really requires their capabilities of choice. If Event-Cloud technology is a very interesting and topical subject, very few research works have considered this to improve emergency management. This paper tries to fill this gap by considering and applying these technologies on a nuclear crisis use-case

ANGELAH: A Framework for Assisting Elders At Home

The ever growing percentage of elderly people within modern societies poses welfare systems under relevant stress. In fact, partial and progressive loss of motor, sensorial, and/or cognitive skills renders elders unable to live autonomously, eventually leading to their hospitalization. This results in both relevant emotional and economic costs. Ubiquitous computing technologies can offer interesting opportunities for in-house safety and autonomy. However, existing systems partially address in-house safety requirements and typically focus on only elder monitoring and emergency detection. The paper presents ANGELAH, a middleware-level solution integrating both ”elder monitoring and emergency detection” solutions and networking solutions. ANGELAH has two main features: i) it enables efficient integration between a variety of sensors and actuators deployed at home for emergency detection and ii) provides a solid framework for creating and managing rescue teams composed of individuals willing to promptly assist elders in case of emergency situations. A prototype of ANGELAH, designed for a case study for helping elders with vision impairments, is developed and interesting results are obtained from both computer simulations and a real-network testbed

Integrating Social Media with Ontologies for Real-Time Crowd Monitoring and Decision Support in Mass Gatherings

Situation awareness plays an essential role in making real-time decisions in mass gatherings. In the last few years, social media data analysis has been proved to be an effective approach to enable and enhance situation awareness. Mass gathering events are dynamic and critical environments where thousands of people attend. During the event, there is a potential for injuries and other health hazards, and thus it is critical for emergency medical services to access real-time and situational awareness information, especially concerning the nature of the crowd. It has been well recognized in the literature that crowd mood and behaviour can have a direct impact on the crowd safety and patient presentation rates. We describe a mobile social media-enabled crowd monitoring architecture that aims to improve emergency management decision-making by analysing the data from social networks in real-time. The proposed architecture incorporates a crowd behaviour classification model, which facilitates real-time situation awareness and provides a better understanding of analysis results. Awareness and perception of crowd mood and behaviour during the event can significantly improve prediction of patient presentation rates; leading to timely and effective medical care provision. The implementation and evaluation of the proposed framework on an Android mobile phone is described

Integration of decision support systems to improve decision support performance

Decision support system (DSS) is a well-established research and development area. Traditional isolated, stand-alone DSS has been recently facing new challenges. In order to improve the performance of DSS to meet the challenges, research has been actively carried out to develop integrated decision support systems (IDSS). This paper reviews the current research efforts with regard to the development of IDSS. The focus of the paper is on the integration aspect for IDSS through multiple perspectives, and the technologies that support this integration. More than 100 papers and software systems are discussed. Current research efforts and the development status of IDSS are explained, compared and classified. In addition, future trends and challenges in integration are outlined. The paper concludes that by addressing integration, better support will be provided to decision makers, with the expectation of both better decisions and improved decision making processes

Collaborative knowledge as a service applied to the disaster management domain

Cloud computing offers services which promise to meet continuously increasing computing demands by using a large number of networked resources. However, data heterogeneity remains a major hurdle for data interoperability and data integration. In this context, a Knowledge as a Service (KaaS) approach has been proposed with the aim of generating knowledge from heterogeneous data and making it available as a service. In this paper, a Collaborative Knowledge as a Service (CKaaS) architecture is proposed, with the objective of satisfying consumer knowledge needs by integrating disparate cloud knowledge through collaboration among distributed KaaS entities. The NIST cloud computing reference architecture is extended by adding a KaaS layer that integrates diverse sources of data stored in a cloud environment. CKaaS implementation is domain-specific; therefore, this paper presents its application to the disaster management domain. A use case demonstrates collaboration of knowledge providers and shows how CKaaS operates with simulation models

SECTOR: Secure Common Information Space for the Interoperability of First Responders

AbstractThe ever-growing human, economic and environmental losses due to natural and/or man-made disasters demand a systematic, holistic, inter-governmental and multi-disciplinary approach to the management of large-scale crisis. However, crisis management is usually coordinated by local authorities, supported by a variety of different national and international crisis management organizations, all acting relatively autonomously. Coordination actions usually adopt non-interoperable information management tools, due to the heterogeneity of the involved organizations, limiting or even hindering the coordination efforts. This paper introduces the efforts conducted in the context of the EU-funded project called SECTOR, which aims at establishing the foundations of future Collaborative Crisis Management (CCM) Information Spaces by expanding the European scientific knowledge base on (cross-border) multi-agency processes and their complications when setting-up and designing the enabling information systems