Distributed Human-Robot System for Chemical Incident Management (DHRS CIM)

Since the events of 9/11 in New York there has been an increasing concern that security of Europe’s citizens and infrastructure is not adequate. National and EC initiatives including the Preparatory Action for Security Research (PASR) have started European activities to address this issue. The European Conference on Security Research SRC’07 in Berlin underlined the challenges facing Europe. The DHRS-CIM project is an EC FP7 Marie Curie project, started in Q4 2008. The project is coordinated by one of the D-CIS Lab partners: Thales Research & Technology Netherlands.

A chemical incident is an example of an event that can hit a densely populated region, such as the Port of Rotterdam and can easily result in a sizeable disaster and crisis. Emergency responders and contingency planners need systems that allow reacting swiftly and effectively. For situational awareness they need to have access to all available information at any given time. They also need to rely on the effectiveness of a variety of emergency services.

Such a system is complex and fuzzy; information sharing is not complete, highly dynamic and the information is uncertain and at best incomplete. All humans in the communication chain think and act, whatever their decisions and mental representations are. All of these actors – individuals, groups of individuals or professionals such as the police, firemen, emergency doctors, etc. are essential nodes in a complex collaborative decision network

In the period where a disaster or crisis is developing the rapid acquisition of data, its understanding and presentation to those responsible for decision making is a key issue. Too much inappropriate data is as bad as too little data – the consequence is that event or situation signatures can not be established and human intuition, which is far from exact, becomes a valuable resource. A similar reasoning can be given for artificial systems, such as stationary sensor networks and mobile swarm robots that have access to more information than humans can ever process within critical time-constraints. Once a situation has developed, establishing its scope and predicting its evolution are necessary to allow informed decision making to determine actions, prioritize and allocate resources and ensure safety.

Objective

The overall objective of this project is to combine forces of Europe’s leading industrial (Thales Nederland B.V., Space Application Services N.V., IdMind - Engenharia de Sistemas Lda) and academic organizations (Universities of Sheffield, Amsterdam and Örebro) in the field of ‘Disaster Management, in order to deliver, through intersectoral exchange of researchers, an intelligent decision support system for humans to manage chemical incidents. This system can be described as a Distributed Human-Robot System for Chemical Incident Management (DHRS-CIM). Intersectoral exchange of knowledge will not only lead to (short term) development of innovative technological breakthroughs within this domain, but will also ensure the development of participating researchers towards multidisciplinary annalists needed for future research in this (timely) relevant field.

The proposed research deals with human and artificial sensing and sense-making to support human decision making in crisis management. The focus on both artificial- and human-system research in order to integrate both is one of the essential contributions of this research proposal: by doing so the artificial systems and humans together become an intelligent collaborative system. In order to devise intelligent systems which can be deployed to detect (potential) chemical incidents and help crisis professionals take informed decisions to manage chemical incidents, research from both stances need to be aligned from the start.

Contact: Masja Kempen