Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - beAWARE (Enhancing decision support and management services in extreme weather climate events)

Teaser

\"The overall context for beAWARE lies in the domain of situational awareness and command and control (C2). The first phase concerns the forecast of the extreme condition and the relevant preparations. Once a disaster occurs, an initial assessment needs to be conducted as soon...

Summary

\"The overall context for beAWARE lies in the domain of situational awareness and command and control (C2). The first phase concerns the forecast of the extreme condition and the relevant preparations. Once a disaster occurs, an initial assessment needs to be conducted as soon as possible to determine the scope, geographical distribution, and scale of the incident. Situational awareness means being able to accurately determine what has happened, what is happening now, and what will come next, all in order to plan and coordinate the most effective response possible with the resources available. This observation phase will lead to an orientation phase suggesting both an individual as well as collective “cognition” orientation to data that is sensed and communicated. Once orientation to the data (or the lack of it) occurs then a decision is made, ultimately resulting is the final step, which is “act”.
The crisis management center is always striving or struggling to gain a sense of what is reality to be able to feel that he or she can make a decision that is the \"\"best possible\"\" given the circumstances. Then, a decision is made at the smallest deployable/operational unit or a higher level of the C2 function. Integral to the “act” step is the ability to communicate the action suggested and then monitor the action (feedback loop) in order to determine whether it resulted in the expected change to the situation. Getting the right people and resources to the right place at the right time will be the essence of the command and control aspect of the disaster response for our approach.
The main objectives of the project are
Obj.1 – Perform a research study on the requirements for emergency services given the current digital landscape (i.e. end user in emergency need, PSAP operator, first responder).
Obj.2 – Multilingual speech and written communication analysis in emergency calls
Obj.3 – Aggregate multimodal information from sensor networks, meteorological stations, etc. and social media for decision support and validation purposes and issue early warnings.
Obj.4 – Visual context analysis during emergency calls.
Obj.5 – Semantic integration of multimodal information from the emergency calls, M2M/IoT platforms and social media for decision support and generation of early warnings.
Obj.6 - Multilingual report generation from aggregated emergency data.
Obj.7 – Research & development of Main Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) for emergency multimedia enriched calls
Obj.8–Design and execute 3 large scale pilots
\"

Work performed

The main results of the project for the reported period are:
-Weather forecasting data (resolution, meteorological parameters, length of forecast) requirements and availability
-98 user requirements were identified and they were finalized at the first User Requirement Workshop in Venice (May 2017)
-design of the pilot use cases and the relevant evaluations
Design and development of the 1st versions of the following components and services
- Crisis Classification and Early Warning
- Social media analysis
-Text analysis
-Report Generation
-PSAP
-KBs
-beAWARE ontology
-sensor thing server
-drones management platform
-end users mobile application

Final results

The overall impact of the project will be determined from the trial evaluation that will take place in the second reported period.
beAWARE 1st prototype impact: beAWARE early warning mechanisms (crisis classification, sensors, weather data, social media analysis) provides all the needed information to the authority to get prepared for a possible future crisis incident. Furthermore, during the crisis the DSS based on reasoning mechanisms and clusters of incidents, together with the PSAP capabilities enhance the over situational awareness in order to have rapud response.
beAWARE 1st prototype impact: In beAWARE the architecture of the advanced services, take into account not only the traditional voice communication but there other channels such as social media and analytics which assist a PSAP operator to assess the validity of information and the weather forecasting update through crisis classification. FMI provides all the needed reliable and updated information during an ongoing crisis disaster event. The crisis classification and the weather forecast will provide the base for the first action during a crisis.
beAWARE 1st prototype impact: beAWARE integrates a broad range of technologies, i.e. social media analytics and knowledge-based reasoning and decision support. Information flow, raw data, processed data and processing results are routed and combined in different layers of the architecture with the ultimate goal of assisting PSAPs and first responders to fully estimate the emergency level of a situation and act in the best possible way.
beAWARE 1st prototype impact: beAWARE takes emergency services response even further by developing a framework that will organise and manage more efficiently the crisis, by enhancing the situational awareness and the early warning mechanisms. Under this approach, beAWARE addresses the expected call impact by offering societal benefits for all citizens. beAWARE consortium includes First Responders partners both from public bodies and law enforcement. The functional and technical requirements provided by First Responders is the basis for all the implementations. Moreover, these partners and their network are testing the system in each phase of development.
Moreover, beAWARE has the following social impacts:
• Impact on the security of people: beAWARE improves the way in which people interact with a PSAP center by using the beAWARE mobile application or through social media by promoting a highly interactive way of communication between the different parties.
• Impact on the emergency working routines: the early warning, the DSS and the reasoning mechanism allow PSAP centers and first responders to do more focused and productive collaboration.
• Society: It facilitates the citizens access to the emergency call centres, thanks to inclusion of new communication channels (call, social media), making possible to inform about an emergency across different devices or services. beAWARE allows access data (information) and emergency services quickly and easily, and it will help us to improve a better understanding among the involved parts.
• First responders: A larger number of emergencies will be detected more quickly and efficiently.
• Policies: beAWARE contributes to the EU disaster management policies by proposing new strategies and technologies.

Website & more info

More info: https://beaware-project.eu/.