beAWARE: Integrated solutions for disaster situations

Challenge

Climate conditions are changing worldwide. This means, among other things, that extreme weather events are becoming more intense and more frequent. All disasters require an immediate, comprehensive and professional response.

Unfortunately, different systems with heterogeneous data from different sources (e.g. environmental data, data from social media, rescue radio) are not compatible with each other. To this day, this fragmented structure dominates emergency management, so that each municipality or federal state has to prepare for disasters under its own responsibility. In the past, this fragmented system often led to the population being exposed to major disaster risks; moreover, a lack of resources caused major losses (of both life and property).

In any disaster or crisis, time is the greatest adversary and it is vital to have accurate information on the scope, extent and impact of the disaster in order to be able to initiate effective crisis management and appropriate recovery measures.
 

Solution

beAWARE collects heterogeneous data from different sources, such as environmental data, data from social media, reports from first responders and/or people at risk and integrates them semantically. This creates an information base for the crisis management centre to support decision-making (see picture "the beAWARE approach").

The beAWARE approach is an integrated solution designed to support:   

• Forecasting, early warning, transmission and dissemination of emergency data
• Aggregated analysis of multimodal data and the coordination of first responders and authorities.

 

The role of Fraunhofer IOSB

Fraunhofer IOSB is already working with European partners on the development of a software that enables the seamless cooperation of heterogeneous IoT platforms (closed industrial solutions and open source). Both established as well as next generation smart objects will be considered to enable the simple, cross-platform development of IoT applications for end users. beAWARE will use this knowledge and adapt it for emergency management, including suitable models for interaction. It also defines the presentation of data and its semantics. The intermediate component implements the required protocol adapters, analyses information about the emergency and integrates it into the beAWARE architecture.

The project is funded by the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme of the European Union. (Grant Agreement No. 70475).