A Qualitative Spatio-temporal Abstraction of a Disaster Space

This paper presents an abstraction of a vague and rapidlychanging environment, an urban disaster space, and a reasoning engine which recognizes and describes the motion of rescue agents as they traverse the disaster space. More specifically, we present a qualitative abstraction of the Robocup Rescue simulation environment, and implement a commentator engine, which constructs a qualitative representation of the changes in the environment and produces descriptions of the agents’ motion by recognizing patterns which motion can take. The patterns recognized are elements of a set of formalizations that qualify each type of motion pattern based on a qualitative representation of vague spatiotemporal moving objects. We also present a set of performance metrics to evaluate our qualitative representation.