Decision support for emergency situations

Emergency situations occur unpredictably and cause individuals and organizations to shift their focus and attention immediately to deal with the situation. When disasters become large scale, all the limitations resulting from a lack of integration and collaboration among all the involved organizations begin to be exposed and further compound the negative consequences of the event. Often in large-scale disasters the people who must work together have no history of doing so; they have not developed a trust or understanding of one another’s abilities, and the totality of resources they each bring to bear have never before been exercised. As a result, the challenges for individual or group decision support systems (DSS) in emergency situations are diverse and immense. In this contribution, we present recent advances in this area and highlight important challenges that remain. This article is part of the “Handbook on Decision Support Systems” edited by Frada Burstein and Clyde W. Holsapple (2008) Springer.     

突发事件情景下地铁站人员应急疏散问题综述*

突发事件情景下,合理的进行地铁站人员应急疏散是减少人员伤亡和财产损失的有效途径。从地铁站人员应急疏散的仿真研究、不同规则下疏散模型的研究和智能算法在疏散建模中的应用三个角度对突发事件下地铁站人员应急疏散问题进行综述,并分析了当前疏散模型、求解算法以及行人特征数据的不完善之处。提出了把行人的心理行为特征、建筑物设施因素引入地铁站人员应急疏散问题中,并利用改进的蚁群算法求解最优疏散路径的重要价值。最后,展望了今后地铁站人员应急疏散问题研究的发展趋势。     

Review on computer vision techniques in emergency situations

In emergency situations, actions that save lives and limit the impact of hazards are crucial. In order to act, situational awareness is needed to decide what to do. Geolocalized photos and video of the situations as they evolve can be crucial in better understanding them and making decisions faster. Cameras are almost everywhere these days, either in terms of smartphones, installed CCTV cameras, UAVs or others. However, this poses challenges in big data and information overflow. Moreover, most of the time there are no disasters at any given location, so humans aiming to detect sudden situations may not be as alert as needed at any point in time. Consequently, computer vision tools can be an excellent decision support. The number of emergencies where computer vision tools has been considered or used is very wide, and there is a great overlap across related emergency research. Researchers tend to focus on state-of-the-art systems that cover the same emergency as they are studying, obviating important research in other fields. In order to unveil this overlap, the survey is divided along four main axes: the types of emergencies that have been studied in computer vision, the objective that the algorithms can address, the type of hardware needed and the algorithms used. Therefore, this review provides a broad overview of the progress of computer vision covering all sorts of emergencies.

     

Android API-based voice recording system in emergency situations

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Smartphones are evolving in various ways, recording technology has also developed. However, most of research is the study of the Call Record and high quality....     

Towards trust management standardization

Recent research in the field of security has evolved into trust issues, which are now one of the interesting research topics. A majority of current approaches proposes techniques that support users' trust processes, while a minority of them addresses the essence of trust. The latter approaches form the basis for the work presented in this paper. Outer manifestations of trust phenomenon are formalized in order to facilitate the development in this field. The main goal is to provide means for computable trust that can be used in a standardized way for contemporary internet-based applications, independently of its cognitive principles.     

Parameter learning of personalized trust models in broker-based distributed trust management

Distributed trust management addresses the challenges of eliciting, evaluating and propagating trust for service providers on the distributed network. By delegating trust management to brokers, individual users can share their feedbacks for services without the overhead of maintaining their own ratings. This research proposes a two-tier trust hierarchy, in which a user relies on her broker to provide reputation rating about any service provider, while brokers leverage their connected partners in aggregating the reputation of unfamiliar service providers. Each broker collects feedbacks from its users on past transactions. To accommodate individual differences, personalized trust is modeled with a Bayesian network. Training strategies such as the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm can be deployed to estimate both server reputation and user bias. This paper presents the design and implementation of a distributed trust simulator, which supports experiments under different configurations. In addition, we have conducted experiments to show the following. 1) Personal rating error converges to below 5% consistently within 10,000 transactions regardless of the training strategy or bias distribution. 2) The choice of trust model has a significant impact on the performance of reputation prediction. 3) The two-tier trust framework scales well to distributed environments. In summary, parameter learning of trust models in the broker-based framework enables both aggregation of feedbacks and personalized reputation prediction.

Edge-centric trust management in vehicular networks

A major objective of vehicular networking is to improve road safety and reduce traffic congestion. The experience of individual vehicles on traffic conditions and travel situations can be shared with other vehicles for improving their route planning and driving decisions. Nevertheless, the frequent occurrence of adversary vehicles in the network may affect the overall network performance and safety. These vehicles may behave intelligently to avoid detection. To effectively control and monitor such security threats, an efficient Trust Management system should be employed to identify the trustworthiness of individual vehicles and detect malicious drivers which is the major focus of this work. We propose a hybrid solution, which integrates Edge Computing and Multi-agent modeling in a Trust Management system for vehicular networks. The proposed solution also aims to overcome the limitations of the two commonly utilized approaches in this context: cloud computing and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking. Our framework has a set of features that make it an efficient platform to address the major security challenges in vehicular networks including latency, scalability, uncertainty, data accessibility, and malicious behavior detection. Performance of the approach is evaluated by simulating a realistic environment. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms similar approaches from literature for various performance indicators.     

Efficient peer-to-peer context awareness data forwarding scheme in emergency situations

Recently, we usually use these words “Edge of Innovation”. It is caused by deployment of smartphone and various hand-held device including wearable devices. In most cases, the devices can easily communicate with other people or devices, and most of modern IT services are the converged services. These are very common phenomenon even in management of the disaster and safety fields. Generally, the emergency situations involve extreme situations such as a horrible congestion, bottleneck, some damaged infrastructure, and so on. Nonetheless, the infrastructure should support communications to the users in these situations. In this case, P2P communications and networking can be one of the best alternatives. In addition, if the P2P communications and networking method which is based on the device location can operate, it will be better solution than others. However, these solutions have been developing now, and the technology level is just a toddler stage, especially measuring indoor location. This is why we proposed the efficient peer-to-peer context awareness data forwarding scheme based on the devices location. The proposed P2P scheme has 2 operation modes. One is the normal mode, the other is the emergency mode. In normal mode, although the proposed P2P scheme is almost same as the existing P2P communication and networking scheme, the proposed P2P scheme is based on the synchronization between each peer when they need to communicate with other peers. In addition, the proposed P2P scheme dynamically assigns a bandwidth to users by the traffic types when the scheme is aware of P2P context. This is reason that it is a purpose to increase user throughput and to guarantee minimum user throughput. On the other hand, the propose P2P scheme will operate not only to find a best path, but also to transfer an emergency message, and the operation mode will automatically change to the emergency mode when the scheme is aware of the emergency situations based on P2P context awareness. Based on the proposed P2P scheme, the user can communicate with other people, and relay the message to outside in the emergency mode. To prove the excellence of proposed P2P scheme, we verified that the proposed P2P scheme outperforms than legacy scheme in various aspects, and we show these simulation results.     

VectorTrust: trust vector aggregation scheme for trust management in peer-to-peer networks

With emerging Internet-scale open content and resource sharing, social networks, and complex cyber-physical systems, trust issues become prominent. Conventional trust mechanisms are inadequate at addressing trust issues in decentralized open environments. In this paper, we propose a trust vector based trust management scheme called VectorTrust for aggregation of distributed trust scores. Leveraging a Bellman–Ford based algorithm for fast and lightweight trust score aggregation, VectorTrust features localized and distributed concurrent communication. Built on a trust overlay network in a peer-to-peer network, a VectorTrust-enabled system is decentralized by nature and does not rely on any centralized server or centralized trust aggregation. We design, implement, and analyze trust rating, trust aggregation, and trust management strategies. To evaluate the performance, we design and implement a VectorTrust simulator (VTSim) in an unstructured P2P network. The analysis and simulation results demonstrate the efficiency, accuracy, scalability, and robustness of VectorTrust scheme. On average, VectorTrust converges faster and involves less complexity than most existing trust schemes. VectorTrust remains robust and tolerant to malicious peers and malicious behaviors. With dynamic growth of P2P network scales and topology complexities, VectorTrust scales well with reasonable overheads (about O(lg?N) communication overheads) and fast convergence speed (about O(log? _D N) iterations).     

On an integrated approach to resilient transportation systems in emergency situations

In this paper we present an integrated approach to the evacuation problem under an emergency situation for transportation systems. The approach is based on a view that a service system has two subsystems: infrastructure and substance. The approach attempts to integrate infrastructure design and substance flow planning to improve the evacuation performance. Without loss of generality, we restrict infrastructure design to reconstruction of a damaged road with two attributes of the road: capacity and travel time, we restrict substance flow planning to the contraflow method, and we consider the evacuation problem with single source and single destination. Further, we apply the discrete variable Particle Swarm Optimization and RelaxIV to solve the problem model. The overall objective function in the problem model is a minimum transportation time. Since recovery of a damaged transportation (damaged road in this case) is implied in our problem, the proposed approach has some significant implication to resilience engineering of a service system as well. An example is studied to show the effectiveness of our approach; in particular it is shown that an integrated solution is significantly better than the solution with only the contraflow method.

     

Trust management and trust theory revision

A theory of trust for a given system consists of a set of rules that describe trust of agents in the system. In a certain logical framework, the theory is generally established based on the initial trust of agents in the security mechanisms of the system. Such a theory provides a foundation for reasoning about agent beliefs as well as security properties that the system may satisfy. However, trust changes dynamically. When agents lose their trust or gain new trust in a dynamic environment, the theory established based on the initial trust of agents in the system must be revised, otherwise it can no longer be used for any security purpose. This paper investigates the factors influencing trust of agents and discusses how to revise theories of trust in dynamic environments. A methodology for revising and managing theories of trust for multiagent systems is proposed. This methodology includes a method for modeling trust changes, a method for expressing theory changes, and a technique for obtaining a new theory based on a given trust change. The proposed approach is very general and can be applied to obtain an evolving theory of trust for agent-based systems.     

X-TM：一种基于XML的信任管理框架

在分析现有信任管理的基础上,结合科学数据网格项目需求,提出了一种基于XML的信任管理框架X-TM。该框架包含了一种基于XML的统一信任证和策略语言,以及完成验证TrustTicket与一致性验证器的信任管理执行器,其主要创新点为可扩展的策略语言和支持TrustTicket与策略缓存的信任管理执行器,具有灵活性和良好的可扩展性等特点。     

基于信任管理机制的推荐系统研究

针对用户兴趣迁移与用户对推荐行为无自主控制两个典型问题,提出了一种新颖的个性化协同过滤推荐策略.通过一种信任管理机制,用户自己管理信任关系.各用户拥有一个列表用来存放信任用户以及信任关系程度,通过用户自主行为可以控制系统的推荐.在推荐过程中,将信任度与相似度合并,得到复合权值,并以此进行推荐.同时,通过比较实际评价值与期望评价值,实时调整信任关系程度.实验结果表明,该策略提高了系统推荐的准确率,一定程度上增强了用户的信心.     

X-TM：一种基于XML的信任管理框架*

在分析现有信任管理的基础上,结合科学数据网格项目需求,提出了一种基于XML的信任管理框架X-TM。该框架包含了一种基于XML的统一信任证和策略语言,以及完成验证TrustTicket与一致性验证器的信任管理执行器,其主要创新点为可扩展的策略语言和支持TrustTicket与策略缓存的信任管理执行器,具有灵活性和良好的可扩展性等特点。     

分布式信任系统的形式化研究

分析了基于委托的信任模型和主观信任模型的信任系统的推导系统,提出了信任策略的形式化描述,并将二者统一于同一推导系统中.在此基础上给出了分布式系统中信任的传递与聚合的基本形式化表达,实现对信任目标的量化计算和分布式传递.最后给出了该方案的应用实例,用于表达分布式网络环境中基于直接信任和推荐信任的计算模型.     

A generic decentralized trust management framework

This paper describes TRUSTPACK , a decentralized trust management framework that provides trust management as a generic service. TRUSTPACK is unique in that it does not provide a central service. Instead, it is run by many autonomous services. This design enables TRUSTPACK to alleviate privacy concerns, as well as potentially provide better personalization and scalability when compared with current centralized solutions. A major component of TRUSTPACK is a generic decentralized graph query processing framework called GRAPHPACK , which was also developed as part of this work. GRAPHPACK consists of a decentralized graph processing language as well as an execution engine, as elaborated in this paper. The paper also presents several examples and a case study showing how TRUSTPACK can be used to handle various trust management scenarios, as well as its incorporation in an existing third party P2P file sharing application. Prototypes of TRUSTPACK and GRAPHPACK are available as open source projects at http://code.google.com/p/trustpack/ and http://code.google.com/p/graphpack/ , respectively. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

信任管理中证书链发现的研究

信任管理是一种适用于大规模的、开放的分布式系统的授权机制。信任管理问题方面包括形式化安全策略和安全凭证,决定是否特定的凭证集合是否可以满足相关的策略以及委托信任给第三方。在信任管理问题中一致性证明是关键而证书链发现问题又是一致性证明的关键。对信任管理中证书链发现问题进行研究,分析了证书的存储和证书链发现算法并指出证书链发现的研究方向。     

Survey of data management and analysis in disaster situations

The area of disaster management receives increasing attention from multiple disciplines of research. A key role of computer scientists has been in devising ways to manage and analyze the data produced in disaster management situations.In this paper we make an effort to survey and organize the current knowledge in the management and analysis of data in disaster situations, as well as present the challenges and future research directions. Our findings come as a result of a thorough bibliography survey as well as our hands-on experiences from building a Business Continuity Information Network (BCIN) with the collaboration with the Miami-Dade county emergency management office. We organize our findings across the following Computer Science disciplines: data integration and ingestion, information extraction, information retrieval, information filtering, data mining and decision support. We conclude by presenting specific research directions.     

Collective management in dynamic situations: the individual contribution

This paper presents an empirical study for extending the ecological safety model developed for individual activity (Amalberti in La conduite des systèmes à risques, PUF, 1996; Hoc and Amalberti in J Cogn Eng Decis Mak 1:22–55, 2007) to collective management. The study took place in a medical emergency center (SAMU) and focused on individual contribution to safety of collective management. The experiment aimed at extending the domain of validity of the conclusions of a previous study (Marc and Amalberti in Trav Hum 65:217–242, 2002) showing that individual intervention (as an actor and as an observer) in collective action was a matter of ecological safety. A “pseudo-simulation” was designed for confronting experienced PARMs and physicians of the SAMU with a series of “safety events” in the functioning of “their” emergency center. In the position of observers, participants were asked to comment on what they observed during a series of short periods of simulated activity and to assess situation mastery by the various actors observed. The results confirm that the model of ecological safety is directly relevant for collective management of “technical errors”: as observers, participants reacted to safety events depending on their potential consequences; not all “erroneous” actions oriented toward task performing were detected, and if detected they were not always identified; participants focused mainly on errors they observed which might have operational consequences on the global quality of safety management in the center. Concerning “non-technical errors” in collective work, participants were focusing on safety management by the physician as the responsible for the center safe functioning; they were less prone to identify safety events related to teamwork itself. These last results can be interpreted at the light of an extension of the ecological model of safety management for taking into account the teamwork-oriented dimension in collective work.