Monitoring and information fusion for search and rescue operations in large-scale disasters

The goal of the project, which is currently under development, is to design tools to monitor the situation after a large-scale disaster, with a particular focus on the task on situation assessment and high-level information fusion, as well as on the issues that arise in coordinating the agent actions based on the acquired information. The development environment is based on the RoboCup-Rescue simulator: a simulation environment used for the RoboCup-Rescue competition, allowing for the design of both agents operating in the scenario and simulators for modeling various aspects of the situation including the graphical interface to monitor the disaster site. Our project is focussed on three aspects: modeling in the simulator a scenario devised from the analysis of a real case study; an extension of the simulator enabling for the experimentation of various communication and information fusion schemes; a framework for developing agents that are capable of constructing a global view of the situation and of distributing specific information, to other agents in order to drive their actions.