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.

[1]  Massimo Mecella,et al.  Emulating mobile ad-hoc networks of hand-held devices: the OCTOPUS virtual environment , 2007, MobiEval '07.

[2]  Nalini Venkatasubramanian,et al.  Multi-Agent Simulation of Disaster Response , 2006 .

[3]  Frank van Harmelen,et al.  Open Knowledge , 2008, LADS.

[4]  Tiziana Catarci,et al.  WORKPAD: an Adaptive Peer-to-Peer Software Infrastructure for Supporting Collaborative Work of Human Operators in Emergency/Disaster Scenarios , 2006, International Symposium on Collaborative Technologies and Systems (CTS'06).

[5]  M De Amicis,et al.  Valutazione degli effetti di un alluvione : il caso di Trento , 2003 .

[6]  Yohei Murakami,et al.  Multi-agent simulation for crisis management , 2002, Proceedings. IEEE Workshop on Knowledge Media Networking.

[7]  Mohamed Ben Ahmed,et al.  Assessing large scale emergency rescue plans: an agent based Approach , 2006 .

[8]  Kazuo Furuta,et al.  A distributed multi-agent simulation system for the assessment of disaster management systems , 2006 .

[9]  Dave Robertson,et al.  How Service Choreography Statistics Reduce the Ontology Mapping Problem , 2007, ISWC/ASWC.

[10]  David Stuart Robertson,et al.  A Lightweight Coordination Calculus for Agent Systems , 2004, DALT.

[11]  Matt Welsh,et al.  Sensor networks for emergency response: challenges and opportunities , 2004, IEEE Pervasive Computing.

[12]  Mohamed Ben Ahmed,et al.  TOWARDS PLANNING FOR EMERGENCY ACTIVITIES IN LARGE-SCALE ACCIDENTS An Interactive and Generic Agent-Based simulator , 2004 .

[13]  Fausto Giunchiglia,et al.  Approximate Structure-Preserving Semantic Matching , 2008, OTM Conferences.

[14]  Nardine Osman,et al.  Interaction models to support peer coordination in crisis management , 2008 .

[15]  Stephen Potter,et al.  FireGrid: An e-infrastructure for next-generation emergency response support , 2010, J. Parallel Distributed Comput..

[16]  D. Robertson.  A Lightweight Method for Coordination of Agent Oriented Web Services ∗ , 2004 .

[17]  Frank van Harmelen,et al.  The OpenKnowledge System: An Interaction-Centered Approach to Knowledge Sharing , 2007, OTM Conferences.