Next is a presentation of the complete system architecture, followed by a discussion of the details of the various services. Amongst these services, management and simulation of tactical planning, management of data and streaming video, the system also presents a service for the annotation of the interested spatial objects. Annotation deploys the web services (Alonso, Casati, Kuno, & Machiraju, 2004) exported by OpenStreetMap (OpenStreetMap) with the purpose to exploit the on-line information sources continuously updated by the social networks communities.
TopIntroduction
In the last ten years the Piedmont region, as like many other regions in Italy and in the world, have been subjected to an increased rate of natural disasters due to frequent episodes of extreme and severe weather conditions that cause floods, landslides, windstorms, fires, earthquakes and tidal waves. In these circumstances, agencies that deal with civil protection need to react promptly and therefore must continuously monitor for just such emergencies and the environment conditions. Furthermore, in regions in which industrial and agricultural activities take place there is a strong need of environmental surveillance to guarantee protection against occurrences of water pollution, unauthorized waste disposal and dumping of dangerous materials.
The case study addresses the geo-spatial services provided by the central station of the SMAT project1. SMAT is a distributed system that applies advanced monitoring of the territory for the prevention and control of a wide range of natural events (floods, landslides, fires) and also for environment protection against human intervention (traffic, urban planning, pollution and cultivation). The system will operate within the integrated organizational structures already in place (institutional or commercial) and will provide information in real time to the authorities responsible for civil protection and intervention in case of an emergency. Examples of these organizations are the government bodies of the Piedmont Region, Provinces, Civil Protection, municipality and ARPA (the Regional Agency for the Prevention and the Environment).
SMAT has the aim to perform territory surveillance by means of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS). SMAT is a system of systems since it controls and coordinates at least three different platforms, each responsible of a fleet composed by specific typology of Unmanned Aircraft Vehicle (UAV). A UAV is equipped with different payload sensors (radar, hyper-spectral, EO, infrared) that will download streaming video of the target territory. Each UAV will operate at different altitudes and thus obtain different benefits in terms of speed and persistence. The operative centers of each UAS (known as Control Station, CS), are already present on the territory and will exchange information with a Supervision and Coordination Station (SS&C).
Figure 1 shows the main components involved in the SMAT project. The aerial components are constituted by three different UAVs. The ground components are constituted by three control stations that are responsible for each UAV tactical control (flight operations, sensor activities), data gathering and data transmission to the SS&C station.
The requirements that the system is called to satisfy are numerous and must respond to different problems and needs.
The goal of the system will be to perform a surveillance of areas subject to natural disasters and a more general surveillance of areas subject to human intervention. These goals require establishing a system able to manage a variety of missions that differ in topics and scenarios. According to the action lines foreseen by the mission (floods, landslides, pollution and aeronautics) the system operator will be able to retrieve, quickly and accurately, relevant data for the mission goal from separate sources (images, video, files, and web). The system should be able to support the integration of various sources of information coming from the different CS. Each UAV, equipped with a set of sensors specific for the singular mission, downloads to its ground control station a large set of information: telemetry data on vehicle position and asset, the sensor images and video of the territory. In turn, each CS communicates to the SS&C the received data (see Figure 1). As regards to data communication links, each ground control station will connect to SS&C with a high performance, dedicated and very efficient link due to the large volume of data that should be provided in near-real-time to the SS&C operators.