Facilitating Communication for First Responders Using Dynamic Distributed Constraint Optimization

The establishment of a common operating picture through shared situation awareness is critical for the management of first responder operations. Situation awareness is the knowledge of the state and physical location of people, objects and terrain within an area of interest. First responder operations can be quite complex, involving the coordination of and collaboration among teams distributed over large areas. Adding to this complexity is the use of heterogeneous networks with diverse radios, traffic flows and applications. This paper describes some initial results using distributed constraint optimization (DCOP) techniques to facilitate situation awareness for first responders. A brief background on DCOP is presented, along with how DCOP can be applied to enable situation awareness. An example demonstrating the application of DCOP algorithms to a particular situation awareness problem is presented. Finally, some critical issues that arise when utilizing DCOP are described, along with some approaches to addressing these issues. By integrating these DCOP techniques with situation awareness tools, we believe that many of the information distribution, interoperability, and networking difficulties faced in the first responder environment can be overcome.