Being ready in case of emergency

How are people going to behave when disaster strikes or there is an emergency situation? How can technology help the rescuers to assist the victims and render the disaster area safer? These issues are being tackled in an information and communication technologies (ICT) project funded under the European Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Commission of which Malta is a partner.

Named SOCIONICAL, the project’s main focus is on creating ‘smart’ environments that will monitor how people behave in emergencies and disasters.

The research will not only model this movement to help plan for effective evacuation, but will also explore how new ‘ambient intelligent’ devices such as a smartphone, can provide essential information during a disaster, that will help evacuees to escape, and thus help to reduce fatalities.

Another area of study will be the movement of traffic after an incident. Part of the technology being explored, will be ‘smart’ technology in cars providing information on the state of other drivers and traffic movement following a disaster, will also be modelled.

One of the scientific principles driving the project is how the technical system reacts to human behaviour, while at the same time influencing it.

In other words the project is trying to investigate how the relationship between the human and the technical system which exists can create an effective socio-technical system that has a practical application which may save lives.

The project is also studying global properties and emergent phenomena that arise in ‘smart’-based socio-technical systems, and how group dynamics may be influenced by the provision of relevant information, and how leaders may emerge in emergency situations.

SOCIONICAL takes a parallel, multi-facetted research approach. Thus, it will address analytical methods, complex networks-based representations, and agent based models. The advances in modelling and prediction will be verified by large scale, distributed simulation driven by real life data.

The Civil Protection Department of Malta is one of the 15 partners forming part of the consortium with the specific role of collecting real life data.

The University of Malta is also involved in the consultation for the research and scientific component. The Faculty of ICT at university has also contributed to real world data scenario setting through a number of student projects.

The project has assembled an interdisciplinary consortium encompassing computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, physics, sociology, psychology, and transportation technology.

Such an interdisciplinary consortium allows us to investigate global properties and emergent phenomena in socio-technical systems from different angles and to include in the investigation all relevant technological, social and psychological factors.

The consortium also contains companies and public bodies, e.g. the strategic planning department of the Italian fire fighters, SmartCare from Italy, the Civil Protection Department of Malta, SICE from Spain dealing with monitoring, management and control of large transport facilities, and the London School of Economics. They can provide realistic scenarios and ensure that the results of the project will influence policy and strategy in relevant areas.

Each partner in the consortium has a well-defined role, with some key competences being held by multiple partners.

The partners in the consortium can be divided into four groups.

The largest group of partners comes from different areas of complexity science and closely related fields.

As socio-technical systems per definition involve social/psychological issues and the understanding of the technology, each of those topics has a group of partners devoted to it.

Finally there are partners who are directly involved with applications related to the SOCIONICAL case studies who will be in charge of providing scenarios, real life data sets, and ensuring that the results of the project lead to relevant guidelines and recommendations for policy makers and industrial decision makers.

www.socionical.eu