| Operations oriented to disaster relief & evacuation management usually take place in continuously changing environment, what requires application of situation management principles. Context is information that can be used to characterize the situation or an entity where an entity is a person, place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and applications themselves. Thereby application of context management technology to disaster relief & evacuation can significantly improve decision making processes in this area. The paper proposes an approach based on the context management to provide for situation awareness. Two types of contexts are considered: abstract (defining structure of the problem / situation) and operational (defining parameters). The operational context is built based on the abstract context and information obtained from sensors and other sources. It is constantly updated to provide up-to-date information for problem solving.
User-centric decision support is also important. The quality of decision making depends upon the quality of information at hand. Problems with information (outdated, incomplete, unreliable, etc.) are a major constraint in decision making. Profiling is a technology designed to help overcoming these limitations. Profiles help to identify, assemble, and organize information in a way which will support the decision making process. The approach assumes application of profiles to accumulate and analyze users’ preferences, levels of responsibility and to take into account previously made decisions.
The paper also presents a case study based on a simulated disaster for validation of the approach. For experimentation purposes disasters of several types are selected. Experimentation with different types of disasters makes it possible to analyze applicability of the approach in different conditions (disaster scale, different sets of required facilities, etc.). |
| A. Smirnov, Prof., received his ME, his PhD and D.Sc. degrees in St.Petersburg, Russia, in 1979, 1984, and 1994 respectively. He is a Deputy Director for Research and a Head of Computer Aided Integrated Systems Laboratory at St.Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPIIRAS). He is a full professor of St.Petersburg State Electrical Engineering University. His current research interests belong to areas of knowledge management, open services, disaster management, group decision support systems, supply chain management. He has published more than 200 research papers in reviewed journals and proceedings of international conferences, books, and manuals. |