ESCAPE - An Adaptive Framework for Managing and Providing Context Information in Emergency...

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ESCAPE: An Adaptive Framework for Managing and Providing Context

Information in Emergency SituationsHong-Linh Truong, Lukasz Juszczyk, Atif Manzoor,

Schahram DustdarDistributed Systems Group, Vienna University of Technology

[email protected]://www.vitalab.tuwien.ac.at/autocompwiki

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23rd Oct 2007 EuroSSC 07, Kendal, UK

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Outline

Scenario, requirements and motivationApproachLevels of context informationESCAPE framework overviewImplementation statusExperiments and current applicationsConclusion and future work


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Scenario

Emergency situationsE.g., Natural disasters (earthquakes, hurricanes, floods)

Multiple support teamsEstablished on demandDeployed at front-end (disaster fields) and back-endsitesConduct various processes to respond to theemergency situation

Collecting information, performing relief tasks, etc.

How to achieve effective response processes?


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Requirements and Motivation

Response processes to emergency situations, such as natural disasters:

Established on demand and changed rapidly, depending contextof the situations

context information associated with entities inherent in the situation is critical to effective response processes

Context information in emergency situation is complexReflects situation, responses, sites, teams and individualsRelated to people, resources and services, their status and activities.


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Requirements and motivation(cont.)

Many context management frameworks existMostly for normal environments, domotics, HCI foremergencies,lack of integration with crisismanagement systems

Some scientific and engineering issues: how toSupport multiple teams collaborating in pervasiveGrid environmentsMake context information available to many crisismanagement supporting tools and servicesEnsure that context information in emergencysituations are extensible and interoperableRuntime interpretation and engineering of context info


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Our Approach

Integration with other tools/servicesSOAP-based and REST (Representational State Transfer)-based modelsDifferent techniques for front-end and back-end integration

Extensible context information representationsSupport XML-based context informationAccept any representations as long as the information is in XML

Flexibility in pervasive environmentsCustomizable software components

Tracing capabilityContext provenance

This paper focuses on middleware aspects


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Levels of Context Information in Emergency Situation

Situation

Response

SiteTeam

Individual

Individual

Individual

Response

Earthquake

Recover railwayssystems

Team OEBB

Salzburg


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ESCAPE Framework Overview

•SOAP-based communication•Mobile adhoc network

REST-basedcommunication

XML-based contextinformation


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ESCAPE Framework Overview

Context information is application-specificThe middleware accepts any XML-based contextinformation

Team memberdiscovery

Plugin internalsoftware sensors

XPath/XQueryrequests


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Query/Subscription and Storage

Query and Subscription APIsCore APIs support requests based on XPath/XQueryApplication-specific query and subscription APIs builtatop core APIs

Lightweight Data StorageHigh-end devices: eXist database with XQuery, XUpdate, etc. PDAs: round-robin model in which XML data isstored in files


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Management of ContextInformation

Stored at thefront-end in team devices

Individual

Site

Response

Situation

Team

Stored at back-end systems

Data aggregration flows

Aggregration withoutknowing content of context information

Pull and push mannerXPath/XQuery-basedfilters

Aggregation of snapshots of contextinformation in [ti, tj]

Level


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Context Provenance Support

For supporting tracingcapabilityTypes of context provenanceinformation

Application-specific informationMiddleware-specific information

ESCAPE supportsmiddleware-specific contextprovenanceStoring provenanceinformation into the back-endsystem


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Implementation Status

Web serviceskSOAP for handling SOAP-based Web services, between CIMSsREST model between CIMS and SCIMS

XPath/XQuery/XUpdate for querying and updating informationHosting environments:

At the front-end: normal laptops and PDAsAt the back-end: SMP machines


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Experiments: WORKPAD contextinformation model


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Experiments – Performance Tests

Devices3 iPAQ 6915 PDAs (Intel PXA 270 416 Mhz, 64 RAM, Windows CE 5.0, 2GB externalminiSD, IBM J9Dell XPS M1210 (Intel Centrino Duo Core 1.83 Ghz, 2GB RAM, Windows XP)Dell D620 (Intel Core 2 Duo 2Ghz, 2GB RAM, Debian LinuxDell Blade (2 Xeon 3.2 Ghz CPUs with hyperthreading, 2GB RAM, Ubuntu Linux)

NetworkMobile adhoc: setting 220Kbits/s (150Kbits/s, observed)100 MB/s to back-end

Two modesSingle team and multiple team leaders


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Experiments: Performance Tests

Single data transfer between a CIMS member (PDA) and CIMS team leader (Laptop)

Concurrent data transfersbetween a CIMS (PDA) and its client (Laptop)

PDA is not suitable for team leader‘s device due to performance reasons


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Experiments: Performance Tests

Performance of transferring data to the back-end system~17KB, every 5 secondsHigh variation between different runs in PDAs

190 ms – 5170 msShould not update an XML document in the back-end with smalldocuments

Store small XML documents and use back-end high capability to processinformation


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Current applications

Enrich GIS management tools with context informationCombine static and heavyweight GIS data (back-end) withvolatile and in-situ context informationEmergency management tools show GIS information annotatedwith context information describing current status of entitieswithin the emergency situation

Provide context information for adaptive processmanagement

Context information is used in adapting tasks performed in disaster responses

improving coordination and decision making of responseactivities based on real-time context information


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Example: search for relevant context information

Context information and GIS: Team A wants to reach to a place „P“. Let‘s check unusable roads leading to „P“

for $infrastructure in collection('/db/contextinformation')//includeInfrastructurewhere $infrastructure/category="ROAD" and $infrastructure/condition="UNUSABLE"return $infrastructure

for $worker in collection('db/contextinformation')//SupportWorkerwhere $worker//hasCamera and $worker/belongsTo/description="Team 1"and $worker//Activity/status="LOW"return $worker

Context information and adaptive processes: Let‘ssend one worker to place „P“ to take a photo


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Conclusion and Future Work

ESCAPE (Emergency Situations, Context Awareness, Pervasive Environments)

Supports extensible context information model and provenanceMakes context information available to front-end and back-endteamsProvides a basis framework for further developments of smart sensing and context in crisis situations

Future workApplications integration: GIS-based and in situ contextinformation support and adaptive processes in disasterresponsesQuality aspects of context informationData aggregation based on rules and XML transformationtechniquesAutomatically process context information using Event-Condition-Action and Complex Event Processing techniques


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Thanks for your attention!

Hong-Linh TruongDistributed Systems GroupVienna University of Technologyhttp://www.vitalab.tuwien.ac.at/autocompwiki

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