OpenKnowledge at work: exploring centralized and decentralized information gathering in emergency contexts

Real-world experience teaches us that to manage emergencies, efficient crisis response coordination is crucial; ICT infrastructures are effective in supporting the people involved in such contexts, by supporting effective ways of interaction. They also should provide innovative means of communication and information management. At present, centralized architectures are mostly used for this purpose; however, alternative infrastructures based on the use of distributed information sources, are currently being explored, studied and analyzed. This paper aims at investigating the capability of a novel approach (developed within the European project OpenKnowledge1) to support centralized as well as decentralized architectures for information gathering. For this purpose we developed an agent-based e-Response simulation environment fully integrated with the OpenKnowledge infrastructure and through which existing emergency plans are modelled and simulated. Preliminary results show the OpenKnowledge capability of supporting the two afore-mentioned architectures and, under ideal assumptions, a comparable performance in both cases

Enabling Information Gathering Patterns for Emergency Response with the OpenKnowledge System

Today's information systems must operate effectively within open and dynamic environments. This challenge becomes a necessity for crisis management systems. In emergency contexts, in fact, a large number of actors need to collaborate and coordinate in the disaster scenes by exchanging and reporting information with each other and with the people in the control room. In such open settings, coordination technologies play a crucial role in supporting mobile agents located in areas prone to sudden changes with adaptive and flexible interaction patterns. Research efforts in different areas are converging to devise suitable mechanisms for process coordination: specifically, current results on service-oriented computing and multi-agent systems are being integrated to enable dynamic interaction among autonomous components in large, open systems. This work focuses on the exploitation and evaluation of the OpenKnowledge framework to support different information-gathering patterns in emergency contexts. The OpenKnowledge (OK) system has been adopted to model and simulate possible emergency plans. The Lightweight Coordination Calculus (LCC) is used to specify interaction models, which are published, discovered and executed by the OK distributed infrastructure in order to simulate peer interactions. A simulation environment fully integrated with the OK system has been developed to: (1) evaluate whether such infrastructure is able to support different models of information-sharing, e.g., centralized and decentralized patterns of interaction; (2) investigate under which conditions the OK paradigm, exploited in its decentralized nature, can improve the performance of more conventional centralized approaches. Preliminary results show the capability of the OK system in supporting the two afore-mentioned patterns and, under ideal assumptions, a comparable performance in both cases

D6.8: Summative report on the use of OpenKnowledge framework in e-Response: integration and evaluation results

This deliverable aims at investigating the capability of the OpenKnowledge framework to support centralised as well as decentralised architectures for information gathering in emergency response management. For this purpose, we developed an agent-based e-Response simulation environment fully integrated with the OpenKnowledge infrastructure and through which existing emergency plans are modelled and simulated. Preliminary results show (1) the overall scalability of the OpenKnowledge kernel to realistic use cases; (2) the capability of the OpenKnowledge framework in supporting the two afore-mentioned architectures and, under ideal assumptions, a comparable performance in both cases

Towards the Application of Interaction-oriented Frameworks to Information Sharing in Emergency Contexts

In distributed, open evironments, possibly heterogeneous computational entities need to engage in complex interactions in order to complete tasks and often have to face sudden changes; it therefore becomes essential for modern information systems to adopt coordination technologies which support dynamic and flexible interactions among processes, whether reactive (e.g., web services) or proactive (e.g., autonomous agents). Substantial efforts are being put forward to devise suitable mechanisms for process coordination. In the past few years, interaction-oriented frameworks have been proposed, which enable distributed and heterogeneus agents to engage in coordination activities by sharing interaction models specified in executable protocol languages. Software systems have started to be developed to apply such frameworks to concrete use. In particular, the OpenKnowledge framework has been proposed as such an interaction-oriented framework, and the OpenKnowledge (OK) system has been developed for its realization. Such system provides a distributed infrastructure which allows a-priori unknown peers to gather together and coordinate with each other by publishing, discovering and executing interaction models specified in the Lightweight Coordination Calculus (LCC) protocol language. Although the realization of the OpenKnowledge approach is promising, its application in realistic, complex scenarios is not fully exploited. This thesis aims at applying the OpenKnowledge framework to realistic contexts such as emergency response (e-Response). Its main contribution is in the design and simulation of emergency response scenarios which are expressed in terms of LCC specifications, and are enacted by means of a simulation environment fully integrated with the OK system. Such environment is developed to: (1) informally validate the e-Response scenarios; (2) test the capability of the OK system to support such scenarios, and (3) provide a preliminary evaluation of the efficacy of different information gathering strategies (i.e., centralized or distributed) in emergency response settings. The results obtained show that the OK system is able to support complex coordination tasks; however, some limitations have emerged in relation to the discovery mechanism. Furthermore, simulations have shown to adhere with realistic scenarios, and that - under ideal conditions - centralized and decentralized information-gathering strategies are comparable

Interaction models to support peer coordination in crisis management

All phases of emergency management activities - that we will reference hereafter as eResponse activities - depend on data from a variety of sources and involve a range of different organizations and teams at various administrative levels with their own systems and services. The existence of numerous and different actors, policies, procedures, data standards and systems results in coordination problems with respect to data analysis, information delivery and resource management. In this paper we present a novel approach based on interaction models distributed through a peer to peer infrastructure and we show how it can be applied in the context of crisis management to support coalition formation and process coordination in open environments. In particular, a prototype eResponse simulation system – built on a P2P infrastructure – has been developed to execute interaction models describing common coordination tasks in emergency response domain. Preliminary evaluation of the proposed framework demonstrates its capability to support such eResponse tasks

D4.9: Summative report on GEA, trust and reputation: integration and evaluation results

This paper provides a detailed description of the evaluation of the GEA algorithm and the Trust component in the OpenKnowledge (OK) project. In particular, it briefly recalls and discusses the implemented trust component architecture and related algorithms, as well as their integration into the OK Kernel architecture. The focus of the paper is the presentation of the results of the evaluation of the trust module on a selected e-Response scenario. Finally, we report some preliminary results obtained using the propose trust module but using a dierent and simplied trust model, in order to access the modularity of the trust module used in OK

Web service integration via matching of interaction specifications

The automated communication of services is crucial to the success of systems such as the Semantic Web. If global standards (the use of which is problematic) are not strictly adhered to, this requires services to be able to interpret both the vocabulary of calls made to them and the structure of these calls. In this paper, we describe the lifecycle of interaction within the OpenKnowledge system, which allows services to be found, contacted and interacted with during run-time without any prior agreement on semantics. Instrumental to this work is our structure-preserving semantic matching technique, which automatically matches inputs and outputs of services with calls representing service requirements, even if the vocabulary and structure of those calls are different to those expected by the service and unknown prior to run-time. We describe in detail a scenario showing the complexity of interaction allowed by our approach, and discuss the evaluation we have done on our techniques and the encouraging results this has produced

Enabling Information Gathering Patterns for Emergency Response with the OpenKnowledge System

Today's information systems must operate effectively within open and dynamic environments. This challenge becomes a necessity for crisis management systems. In emergency contexts, in fact, a large number of actors need to collaborate and coordinate in the disaster scenes by exchanging and reporting information with each other and with the people in the control room. In such open settings, coordination technologies play a crucial role in supporting mobile agents located in areas prone to sudden changes with adaptive and flexible interaction patterns. Research efforts in different areas are converging to devise suitable mechanisms for process coordination: specifically, current results on service-oriented computing and multi-agent systems are being integrated to enable dynamic interaction among autonomous components in large, open systems. This work focuses on the exploitation and evaluation of the OpenKnowledge framework to support different information-gathering patterns in emergency contexts. The OpenKnowledge (OK) system has been adopted to model and simulate possible emergency plans. The Lightweight Coordination Calculus (LCC) is used to specify interaction models, which are published, discovered and executed by the OK distributed infrastructure in order to simulate peer interactions. A simulation environment fully integrated with the OK system has been developed to: (1) evaluate whether such infrastructure is able to support different models of information-sharing, e.g., centralized and decentralized patterns of interaction; (2) investigate under which conditions the OK paradigm, exploited in its decentralized nature, can improve the performance of more conventional centralized approaches. Preliminary results show the capability of the OK system in supporting the two afore-mentioned patterns and, under ideal assumptions, a comparable performance in both cases.JRC.H.6-Digital Earth and Reference Dat