I. INTRODUCTION The goal of our work is to explore research in the framework of an end-to-end speech processing system that can automatically process human conversations to create situational awareness during crisis response. Situational awareness refers to knowledge about the unfolding crisis event, the needs, the resources, and the context. Accurate assessment of the situation is vital to ena...

The aim of this paper is to present a multi-agent based approach for crisis management. The proposed framework oriented towered fire fighting and suppression. The main purpose of this system is to enable the users manage fire by providing advice to enhance the decision process and response. A multi-agent system that decomposed of a fire control KADS-based expert system agents, GIS agent, and ot...

The objective of this paper is to explore the feasibility of using multiple low-altitude, short endurance (LASE) unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) to cooperatively monitor and track the propagation of large forest fires. A real-time algorithm is described for tracking the perimeter of fires with an on-board infrared sensor. Using this algorithm, we develop a decentralized multiple-UAV approach to mo...

Each year, hundred millions hectares of forests burn causing human and economic losses. For efficient fire fighting, the personnel in the ground need tools permitting the prediction of fire front propagation. In this work, we present a new technique for automatically tracking fire spread in three-dimensional space. The proposed approach uses a stereo system to extract a 3D shape from fire image...

Critical incident stress debriefings (CISDs) are a form of crisis management for rescuers such as police officers, fire-fighters and others involved in rescue efforts during natural disasters. This article describes a qualitative evaluation study of one police department's CISD implementation. Participant observation and semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten police officers involve...

Analyses of disasters such as the Piper Alpha explosion (Sylvester-Evans and Drysdale, 1998), the World Trade Centre collapse (Torero et al, 2002, Usmani et al, 2003) and the fires at Kings Cross (Drysdale et al, 1992) and the Mont Blanc tunnel (Rapport Commun, 1999) have revealed many mistaken decisions, such as that which sent 300 fire-fighters to their deaths in the World Trade Centre. Many ...

The missions for the police and fire fighters are to protect for public safety and to fight and prevent from fires, respectively. In this dynamic environment, however, there are many potential dangers and uncertain factors that can’t be predicted. In order to improve the total performance, some rules extracted from criminal and fire-fighting records are needed. The purpose of this paper is to m...

Rescuers have lost their lives in events requiring them to go into dangerous areas that have unstable structures, gases and environments. Robots are necessary for search and rescue purposes, to access concealed places and environments that fire fighters and rescue personnel cannot gain entry to. The contractible arms elevating search and rescue (CAESAR) robot was designed and developed to assis...