Abstract: Effective decision-supporting visualization is critical for strategic, tactic, and operational management before and during a large-scale climate or extreme weather emergency. Most emergency management applications traditionally consist of map-based event and object visualization and management, which is necessary for operations, but has small contribution to decision makers. At the same time, analytical models and simulations that usually enable prediction and situation evaluation are often analyst-oriented and detached from the operational command and control system. Nevertheless, emergencies tend to generate unpredictable effects, which may require new decision-support tools in real-time, based on alternative data sources or data streams. In this paper, we advocate the use of dashboards for emergency management, but more importantly, we propose an intelligent mechanism to support effective and efficient utilization of data and information for decision-making via flexible deployment and visualization of data streams and metric displays. We employ this framework in the H2020 beAWARE project that aims to develop and demonstrate an innovative framework for enhanced decision support and management services in extreme weather climate events.

Abstract: Globally floods are categorized as one of most devastating natural disasters and annually causing a major loss to human lives and economy. For rapid damage assessment and planning relief activities a large scale spatio-temporal overview is required to assist local authorities. This paper aims to provide an overview of a Sentinel-1 based near-real time flood mapping/monitoring service; which is implemented as an operational service under the framework of I-REACT (Improving Resilience to Emergencies through Advanced Cyber Technologies) project.

Abstract: Accurate predictions of severe weather events are extremely important for society, economy, and environment. Due to the fact that weather forecasts are inherently uncertain, it is required to give information about forecast uncertainty to all users providing weather forecasts in probabilistic terms utilizing ensemble forecasts. Since ensemble forecasts tend to be under dispersive and biased, they need to be calibrated with statistical methods. This paper presents a method for the calibration of temperature forecasts using Gaussian regression, and the calibration of wind gust forecasts with a box-cox t-distribution method. Statistical calibration was made for the operational European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ensemble prediction system (ENS) forecasts for lead times from 3 to 360 hours. The verification results showed that calibration improved both temperature and wind gust ensemble forecasts. The probabilistic temperature forecasts were better after calibration over whole lead time scale, but the probabilistic wind gust forecasts up to 240 hours.

Abstract: Currently social media are largely used in interactions, especially in crisis situations. We note a big volume of interactions around events. Observing these interactions give information even to alert the existence of an incident, event, or to understand the expansion of a problem. Crisis management actors observe social media to be aware about this type of information in order to consider them in their decisions. Specific organizations are founded in order to observe social media interactions and send their analysis to rescue and crisis management actors. In our work, an experience feedback of this type of organizations (VISOV, a crisis social media analysis association) is capitalized in order to emphasize from one side, main dimensions of this analysis and from another side, to simulate some aspects using TextMining that help to explore big volume of data.

Abstract: Traffic emergencies and resulting delays cause a significant impact on the economy and society. Traffic flow estimation is one of the early steps in urban planning and managing traffic infrastructure. Traditionally, traffic flow rates were commonly measured using underground inductive loops, pneumatic road tubes, and temporary manual counts. However, these approaches can not be used in large areas due to high costs, road surface degradation and implementation difficulties. Recent advancement of computer vision techniques in combination with freely available closed-circuit television (CCTV) datasets has provided opportunities for vehicle detection and classification. This study addresses the problem of estimating traffic flow using low-quality video data from a surveillance camera. Therefore, we have trained the novel YOLOv4 algorithm for five object classes (car, truck, van, bike, and bus). Also, we introduce an algorithm to count the vehicles using the SORT tracker based on movement direction such as ``northbound'' and ``southbound'' to obtain the traffic flow rates. The experimental results, for a CCTV footage in Christchurch, New Zealand shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach. In future research, we expect to train on large and more diverse datasets that cover various weather and lighting conditions.

Abstract: Situation Awareness (SA) has been recognized and studied as an important requirement for an effective task performance of first responders. The integration of increasingly advanced sensor, network and artificial intelligence technology into the work processes affects the building, maintenance and sharing of SA. Connecting SA to decision support models provides new possibilities for the development of actionable SA (aSA), entailing information that guides the momentary decision-making processes of the concerning actors. In the European ASSISTANCE project, we are developing an aSA module that displays information about gas distributions, its current and predicted future states (e.g., entailing risks of breathing-in of toxic gases), with references to effective decision-making patterns for this situation. The aSA model is continuously updated based on sensor data. This paper gives an overview of this aSA module for chemical hazard prediction and corresponding display, and presents initial team design patterns that will be integrated into this display to support its actionability.

Abstract: Large crisis scenarios involve several actors, acting at the blunt-end of the process, such as rescue team directors, and at the sharp-end, such as firefighters. All of them have different perspectives on the crisis situation, which could be either coherent, alternative or complementary. This heterogeneity of perceptions hinders situational awareness, which is defined as the achievement of an overall picture on the above-mentioned crisis situation. We define knowledge fusion as the process of integrating multiple knowledge entities to produce actionable knowledge, which is consistent, accurate, and useful for the purpose of the analysis. Hence, we present a conceptual modelling approach to gather and integrate knowledge related to large crisis scenarios from locally-distributed sources that can make it actionable. The approach builds on the WAx framework for cyber-socio-technical systems and aims at classifying and coping with the different knowledge entities generated by the involved operators. The conceptual outcomes of the approach are then discussed in terms of open research challenges for knowledge fusion in crisis scenarios.

Abstract: During disasters public health organizations increasingly face challenges in acquiring and transforming real-time data into knowledge about the dynamic public health needs. Resources on the internet can provide valuable information for extracting knowledge that can help improve decisions which will ultimately result in targeted and efficient health services. Digital content such as online articles, blogs, and social media are some of such information sources that could be leveraged to improve the health care systems during disasters. To efficiently and accurately identify relevant disaster health information, extraction tools require a common vocabulary that is aligned to the health domain so that the knowledge from these unstructured digital sources can be accurately structured and organized. In this paper, we study the degree to which the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) contains relevant disaster, public health, and medical concepts for which public health information in disaster domain could be extracted from digital sources.

Abstract: We are interested in rescue management in crises such as in terrorist attacks. Today, there are emergency plans that take into account all the stakeholders involved in a crisis depending on the event type, magnitude and place. Unfortunately, they do not anticipate the evolution of the crisis situation such as traffic and hospital overcrowding. In addition, decisions are taken after the information has been passed from the operational level to higher levels. This work focuses on the operational level of the emergency plan. What will happen if the actors at this level, can make certain decisions without escalating the information to higher levels? To answer this question, a multi-agent dynamic planning approach is proposed and it will be tested in two different architectures in order to see how much autonomy can be given to an agent and how they coordinate to save the victims.

Abstract: Epidemic spreading simulation in social networks denotes a set of techniques that allow to assess the temporal evolution and the consequences of a pandemic. They were largely used by governments and International health organizations during the COVID-19 world crisis to decide the appropriate countermeasures to limit the diffusion of the disease. Among them, the existing simulation techniques based on a network model aimed at studying the infectious disease dynamics have a prominent role and are widely adopted. However, even if they leverage the topological structure of a social network, they disregard the intrinsic and individual features of its members. A semantic social network is defined as a structure consisting of interlinking layers, which include a social network layer, to represent people and their relationships and a concept network layer, to represent concepts, their ontological relationships and implicit similarities. Here, we propose a novel epidemic simulation framework that allows to describe a community of people as a semantic social network, to adopt the most commonly used compartmental models for describing epidemic spreading, such as Susceptible-Infected-Susceptible (SIS) or Susceptible-Infected-Removed (SIR), and to enable semantic reasoning to increase the accuracy of the simulation. Finally, we show how to use the framework to simulate the impact of a pandemic in a community where the job of each member is known in advance.

Abstract: Post-disaster information processing is relevant for the continuous improvement of operations and the reductionof risks. The current methodologies for post-disaster review suffer from several limitations, which reduce their use as a way of translating narrative in data for qualitative and quantitative analysis. Learning or effective knowledge sharing need a common formalism and method. Ontologies are the reference tool for structuring information in a “coded” data structure. Using the investigation of disaster management during the 2017 hurricane season in the French West Indies within the scope of the ANR “APRIL” project, this contribution introduces a methodology and a tool for providing a graphical representation of experiences for post-disaster review and lessons learning, based on a novel approach to case-based ontology development.

Abstract: All countries have to face the COVID’19 pandemic and its heavy consequences. This sanitary crisis differs from all others in terms of the quick spread of contaminations, the high number of deaths (more than 5,5 Million globally and 123,893 in France) and the accrued number of patients hospitalized and induced in intensive care units. All sanitary procedures have proven to be inadequate. Several actors at different levels, whether international, European, national and local, as well as at the level of public and private organizations have been involved in the management of this type of crisis. These actors deal with different aspects of it, i.e., health, people protection, and economic and social situations. Existing procedures revealed a big lack in the relationships between different local and departmental actors. We did a number of interviews with strategic actors addressing the COVID’19 crisis in the City of Troyes. The objective of these interviews is to identify lessons learned from their experience feedback about relational problems and modifications needed. We present in this paper the first results of this study.