Monitoring Search and Rescue Operations in Large-Scale Disasters

The present contribution is concerned with designing tools to monitor a situation after a large-scale disaster, with a particular focus on the task of highlevel Information Fusion within a multi-agent approach. The Multi-Agent System is based on the RoboCup-Rescue simulator: a simulation environment used for the RoboCup-Rescue competition, allowing for the design of both agents operating in the scenario and simulators for modeling various aspects of the situation, including a graphical interface to monitor the disaster site. The design of a Multi-Agent System with planning, information fusion, and coordination capabilities is described according to the agent model underlying the Cognitive Agent Development Toolkit, which is one of the outcomes of our recent research. Finally, we discuss the issues related to the evaluation of the performances achieved by Multi-Agent Systems in search and rescue operations according to the proposed approach and discuss some results obtained in a case study relative to the Umbria and Marche earthquake of 1997.

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