Professional robots should be endorsed with great autonomy capabilities when designed for release into the market. The need for autonomy is further reinforced when robots are meant to be used for... Show More

Professional robots should be endorsed with great autonomy capabilities when designed for release into the market. The need for autonomy is further reinforced when robots are meant to be used for crisis management situations, where close collaboration with humans and trustworthy operation in hazardous environments is necessary. To this end, this article quantifies the system's autonomy by measuring its dependability. This is achieved by defining a qualitative metric system regarding the different levels of dependability that autonomous systems should retain in order to operate in various crisis situations. It provides a detailed analysis of each level of dependability and proposes the minimum requirements that should be fulfilled in each level, thus realizing a ranking system that outlines the overall system's ability to operate autonomously. The proposed analysis is applied on a real robotic prototype developed for crisis situations and evaluates the system's autonomy capabilities by qualitative assessing the levels of dependability it retains.

During the last few decades, climate change has increased air pollutant concentrations with a direct and serious effect on population health in urban areas. This research introduces a hybrid... Show More

During the last few decades, climate change has increased air pollutant concentrations with a direct and serious effect on population health in urban areas. This research introduces a hybrid computational intelligence approach, employing unsupervised machine learning (UML), in an effort to model the impact of extreme air pollutants on cardiovascular and respiratory diseases of citizens. The system is entitled Air Pollution Climate Change Cardiovascular and Respiratory (APCCCR) and it combines the fuzzy chi square test (FUCS) with the UML self organizing maps algorithm. A major innovation of the system is the determination of the direct impact of air pollution (or of the indirect impact of climate change) to the health of the people, in a comprehensive manner with the use of fuzzy linguistics. The system has been applied and tested thoroughly with spatiotemporal data for the Thessaloniki urban area for the period 2004-2013.

City resilience is a pressing issue worldwide since the majority of the population resides in urban areas. When disaster strikes, the consequences will be more severe in the cities. To achieve... Show More

City resilience is a pressing issue worldwide since the majority of the population resides in urban areas. When disaster strikes, the consequences will be more severe in the cities. To achieve resilience, different organizations, agencies and the public should share information during a disaster. ICT-based community engagement is used for strengthening resilience. The authors propose a set of metrics for assessing the security and privacy of information sharing tools for resilience. They then apply the selected metrics to a selection of information sharing tools. The authors' main finding is that most of them are reasonably well-protected, but with less than private default settings. They discuss the importance of security and privacy for different important categories of users of such systems, to better understand how these aspects affect the willingness to share information. Security and privacy is of particular importance for whistle-blowers that may carry urgent information, while volunteers and active helpers are less affected by the level of security and privacy.

Managing crises with limited resources through a serious game is deemed as one of the ways of training and can be regarded as an alternative to a table-top exercise. This article presents the... Show More

Managing crises with limited resources through a serious game is deemed as one of the ways of training and can be regarded as an alternative to a table-top exercise. This article presents the so-called “Operasjon Tyrsdal” serious game, inspired by a real case of extreme weather that hit the west coast of Norway. This reference case is used to add realism to the game. The game is designed for a single player, while the mechanics are framed in such a way that the player will have limited resources, and elevated event pressure over time. Beside applying an iterative Scrum method with seven Sprint cycles, we combined the development work with desk research and used the involvement of testers, including crisis responders. The resulting game has expected features and behaviors, is game(ful), but allow the player to learn through an “After Action” report that logs all player's decisions, which is intended to trigger discussions.

Over the last few decades, interest has grown in the use of serious games (SG) and their assessment in almost every sector. A privileged application domain of SG is crisis management (CM) in which... Show More

Over the last few decades, interest has grown in the use of serious games (SG) and their assessment in almost every sector. A privileged application domain of SG is crisis management (CM) in which these tools improve crisis behavior and/or management in a safe environment while reducing training costs. However, it is difficult to characterize and evaluate such specific SG. This article proposes a comprehensive grid defining features for description, analysis and evaluation of Crisis Management Serious Games (CMSG). First of all, the authors introduce SG, CM as well as evaluation and assessment concepts, and discuss their particular challenges by highlighting the need of using assessment and evaluation techniques to support learning and/or training. Then, the authors present, classify and compare the most relevant techniques dedicated to address this need by encompassing the state of the art of learners' assessment and evaluation approaches used in CMSG. Finally, this article presents in detail the proposed grid and discusses the major findings and contributions.

The disaster response still faces problems of collaboration due to lack of policies concerning the information exchange during the response. Moreover, plans are prepared to respond to a disaster... Show More

The disaster response still faces problems of collaboration due to lack of policies concerning the information exchange during the response. Moreover, plans are prepared to respond to a disaster, but drills to apply them are limited and do not allow to determine their efficiency and conflicts with other organizations. This paper presents a framework allowing for different organizations involving in the disaster response to assess their collaboration through its simulation using an explicit representation of their knowledge. This framework is based on a multi-agent system composed of three generic agent models to represent the organizational structure of disaster response. The decision-making about response actions is done through task decomposition and repartition. It is based reasoning on ontologies which provides an explicit trace of the response plans design and their execution. Such framework aims at identifying cooperation problems and testing strategies of information exchange to support the preparation of disaster response.