| MOSAIC |
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Organization responsible: Thales Nederland, vts Politie Nederland People involved:
Project description: Multi-Officer System of Agents for Informed Crisis Control (MOSAIC) is one of the valorization efforts of the ICIS project, in which ICIS research results’ and technologies are demonstrated. The vts Politie Nederland (Voorziening tot Samenwerking) supports the overall Dutch law enforcement and security chain with ICT and actively explores new techniques; DECIS Lab is one of their involved knowledge institutes. MOSAIC addresses a twofold challenge: on the one hand create ‘super situation awareness’ by retrieving relevant information from a wide range of heterogeneous data sources and on the other hand to avoid information overload. The setting is the control room (‘meldkamer’) from which policemen (‘executieven’) are directed to resolve an incident. The super situation awareness concerns being aware of other events that the incident can interfere with or that can arise as a consequence of the incident. An example is chosen for the demonstrator in which a relatively simple incident (a car on fire in a car parking) can escalate when two other events come into play: the festive opening of a department store and the regular re-supply of a supermarket. Information about these two events is mostly known beforehand in a number of information sources which are usually not consulted during incident management. The example is demonstrated via two scenarios. In the first scenario, everyday systems are employed in which the two other events are not discovered in time; resulting in a grid-locked city and relatively long incident resolution time. In the second scenario, the management of an incident is supported by software agents which collect relevant information from multiple, heterogeneous, data sources and inform the involved humans in a timely fashion, whereby the two events are discovered earlier on, gridlock is mostly prevented and less time is spent on incident resolution. Drawing from the research fields Information Retrieval and Multi-Agent Systems, a framework is currently being prototyped in which software agents are responsible for three main functionalities, the first functionality is the management of information around an incident by an ‘IMCA’ (incident management and coordination assistant agent), the second functionality is the information retrieval from multiple heterogeneous data sources, involving the ‘MIRA’ (meldkamer information retrieval assistant agent) responsible for query formulating and answer aggregation, and ‘DALs’ (data access laisions) which manage database specific access. The final functionality is the dissemination of information to the policemen by ‘PALs’ (Personal Assistant and Liaison agents) and coalitions of ‘PALs’ involved in the same incident. Information overload is managed by IMCAs for the control room, and PALs for the policemen. The framework and demonstrator are designed to accommodate inclusion of other security services such as the fire brigade, medical services, and even the general population. Publications:
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