The Technical Review Meeting of the Search & Rescue action was completed online on the 2nd of March with great success. During the meeting, the progress of the project and the outstanding technical work carried out during the last year was presented by the WP leaders and relevant Task leaders in a collaborative atmosphere. In the same spirit, the EU Project Officer together with 2 experts from the field provided their constructive feedback about the ongoing activities and expressed their enthusiasm about the outcomes and the project’s potential in the area of crisis management. In particular, the Search and Rescue project aims to design, implement and test through a series of large scale pilot scenarios a highly interoperable, modular open architecture platform for first responders or emergency response units in critical conditions, such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks etc.
In Search and Rescue, UBITECH is developing a situation awareness model which will constitute an extendable set of main concepts such as actors, their roles and tasks during rescuer operation as well as an abstract flow of information of S&R. More specifically, the model will a) define the decisions that first responders (and other actors) make during the course of S&R operation, b) represent the types of critical information required in order to support the various actors with their tasks; and c) represent the important information flows that potentially exist between involved actors, mediated by a knowledge management system in the form of notifications, alerts and timely information supply. Moreover, UBITECH implements a knowledge based visualization support and relevant interfaces linked to the forefront such as VR and mobile interfaces to allow first responders quickly grasp the picture of the building and their surroundings during rescue operations.
