A Scalable Open Monitoring Platform Environment For Risk Management
Raimar J. Scherer and Gerald Faschingbauer · Proceedings of the Joint CIB W78, W102, ICCCBE, ICCC, and DMUCE International Conference on Computing and Decision Making in Civil and Building Engineering, Montreal, Canada, 14-16 June · 2006
Handling crises requires making decisions, based on sufficient knowledge about the situation. New developments in ICT enable to make the existing capacities of data and information usable in order to provide decision makers and task forces with the knowledge necessary for taking decisions as quickly as possible and hence to reduce response times considerably. Today, risk management systems are proprietary client server systems developed for particular hazards and specific scenarios, i.e. they are not open and scalable. Recent approaches have extended these client server systems to ASP technology. However, these application services, platforms and sensor systems are built on their own infrastructures, islands of functionality that cannot be easily shared and integrated in one logically common but distributed environment. In this paper we will present a concept for a novel ICT environment for a dynamically optimized management of emergency and crisis situations generated by natural hazards and industrial accidents focused on the estimation of the actual constitution of engineering structures based on sensor data and engineering models. The main idea is a Scalable open Monitoring Platform Environment which will deliver a sustainable approach for ICT-based integration and information computing and which can improve management and logistics in the aftermath of hazardous events. The architecture of the platform environment is modular and extendable, immediately available and highly distributed: this can be accomplished by the integrated combination of four main “state-of-the-art” and high potential technologies: (i) GRID technology for enhanced distributed data management and computation, (ii) Semantic Knowledge Technologies (SKT) to manage smart optimization of generalized novel risk management ontologies, (iii) intelligent self-adapting sensor networks for smart access to local information resource, combining in-situ sensors as well as human observers (“human sensors”), and (iv) Virtual Organisation / Concurrent Engineering paradigms so as to deal with multidisciplinary and dynamic work environments with multi-stakeholder involvement, that are required for monitoring of very different structures.