DESIGN AND ORGANIZATION OF AUTONOMOUS SYSTEMS

This is the website of the 'Interactive response system for crisis management' - group:


Our final report and our final presentation.

A document collection can be found here
The project webpage

When there is a crisis, there will be lots of emergency troops trying to help. Police, fireguards and medical personell will be all over the place. A central control room which knows which troop is doing what, can add a lot of efficiency to crisis management. Accurate and up-to-date information is crucial for making good decisions. But often there aren't enough sensors in an area to fulfill that need. However, there may be numerous people near the scene who could provide valuable information. It may also occur that sensors are giving confusing information; important types of sensors may be missing, and no conclusion can be drawn about what is happening. In that situation, more information is needed to come to a clear conclusion. That information can be retrieved by asking humans. For example, on the sixth floor of a building 2 out of 15 smoke detectors are being triggered. Are these detectors malfunctioning or is the sixth floor on fire? Perhaps a gas has been released that triggers the smoke detectors. Several scenarios could be possible, but none of them with a definite certainty. Our system detects that and would like to gather more certainty about whether or not there is a fire on the sixth floor. It looks up which persons are near the potential fire and contacts them. Those persons may be in another room not knowing what's happening. But there may be some who actually see the fire. They respond to the system and with that extra information, it is calculated that fire is the most probable cause. Within minutes the fireguards enter the building and extinguish the fire. Our goal is that the system will be able to give a useful advise to an expert (for example: the control room, the emergency troops).