Merik Meriste

Towards middleware based situation awareness

Potential solution to some problems related to forming, updating, and personalized distribution of companys level local operational picture (LOP) is suggested. Sensor networks, information collected by UAV-s and UGV-s, observations from reconnaissance parties, larger scale COP that sporadically become available are considered as sources of information. At the companys level LOP has to be made available in a personalized form to any member (including autonomous devices) of the company.

Situation awareness for networked systems

Modern technology offers the possibility to construct networked monitoring systems from autonomous computing nodes equipped with appropriate sensors. Complementing such a system with actuators yields a cyber-physical system that must be able to cope with uncertainties arising from feedback loops via the physical world. The common property of such systems lies in the high degree of uncertainty in the varying configuration of the system and also in the potentially high amounts of (unstructured) data that can be generated by such a system. In order to tackle these problems and make the distributed monitoring systems more usable the concepts of situational information and hierarchies of situations can be applied in this domain. The problem of high amounts of data can be partially solved by arriving at a higher level of abstraction lower in the processing chain, communicating only data fused into an ontological structure to information consumers. The fusion templates are called situation parameters and values of the fused data items are called situational parameter values in the context of the current article. Situation parameter values must be tagged with situational and temporal validity information in order to cope with the delays and spatial uncertainties that can occur in a distributed monitoring system. The lower level situation parameters can be fused to even higher level situation parameters, projecting the temporal and spatial validity information from the lower level parameters up to the higher level parameters. The article presents the concepts of forming situational information templates and hierarchies based on data available from a distributed monitoring system where the temporal and spatial properties of situational information are taken into account. A case study is presented that shows the feasibility of the concepts in a real world monitoring scenario.

Agent-oriented modelling for simulation of complex environments

This article addresses the application of agent-oriented modelling to composing scenarios for simulating problem domains consisting of heterogeneous entities that include humans, physical subsystems, and software components whose behaviours depend on the situation at hand. The article presents an overview of agent-oriented modelling and addresses the application of agent-oriented modelling and simulation for context-aware crisis management and military urban operations. We develop an approach for constructing vignettes of situation-aware behaviour to be further simulated by means of software agents and describe the creation of practical context-aware training scenarios. Finally, the article explores a platform currently in use for possible execution of agent-based simulations. Our approach is applicable in practice for testing typical behavioural vignettes in specific scenarios using the platform. Unique benefit of the proposed approach is its usability to observe how real subjects form their decisions to behave in certain situations.

Self-aware architecture to support partial control of emergent behavior

System of systems comprises interacting, heterogeneous, autonomous components with incomplete information about their inner states, and about the surrounding environment. Many interactions are often not rigorously defined, and change dynamically. System of systems usually exhibits emergent behavior that cannot be predicted by analyzing static properties of the components, and is not always permissible. This paper suggests that the designer can improve systems behavior by substituting (part of) regular interactions with smart mediated interactions that bolster up shared situation awareness of the systems components and thus strengthens systems capability to monitor and partially control its emergent behavior. This paper discusses smart mediated interactions that focus on awareness of temporal features and on estimates of spatial location of the components. Interactions are assembled into proactive middleware that forms a backbone of system of systems.

Training Support for Crisis Managers with Elements of Serious Gaming

This paper presents a methodology and a prototypic software implementation of a simple system supporting resource management training for crisis managers. The application that is presented supports the execution and assessment of a desktop training for decision makers on a tactical and strategic level. It introduces elements of turn-based strategic “serious gaming”, with a possibility to roll back in time and re-try new decision paths, while keeping the graphical user interface as simple as possible. Consequently, the development efforts concentrated on: (1) formulating and executing crisis management decisions; (2) assuring responses of all simulated entities adhere to natural laws of the real world; and (3) analyzing progress and final results of the training exercise. The paper presents the lessons learned and discusses the transferability and extensibility of the proposed solution beyond the initial scenario involving accidental release of toxic gas in an urban area in Israel.

On dynamic models for wind farms as systems of systems

The authors consider a wind-farm as a system of systems consisting of a number of wind turbines as sub-systems. Each wind turbine comprises its own sensor network and automation units for control and monitoring of turbines work, structural integrity and environmental situation. Sensing of environment is hierarchical - a single wind turbine senses local conditions and informs both neighbors and central control. The wind-farms central control owes its situational awareness to single turbines at the sites and areal environmental sensors. The wind turbines, embodied into the same environment, get influenced by and influence both the environment and neighbors. Interaction with the environment, influencing the neighbors and being subjected to central control lead to agent-based modeling and simulation as a convenient method for better monitoring and understanding the work of wind-farms.