ICT solutions supporting collaborative information acquisition, situation assessment and decision making in contemporary environmental management problems: the DIADEM approach

Abstract

This paper presents a framework of ICT solutions developed in the EU research project DIADEM that supports environmental management for chemical hazards in industrial areas, with an enhanced capacity to assess population exposure and health risks, alert relevant groups and organize efficient response. The emphasis is on advanced solutions which are economically feasible and maximally exploit the existing communication, computing and sensing resources. This approach supports collaborative information acquisition thus enabling efficient situation assessment and decision making in complex environmental management applications. This is achieved through a combination of (i) a service-oriented approach supporting the integration of automated and human-based reasoning for large-scale collaborative sensemaking, (ii) advanced approaches to gas detection and gas distribution modelling, (iii) novel solutions combining Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis and Scenario-Based Reasoning and (iv) enhanced human-machine interfaces. This paper presents the basic principles of the DIADEM solutions and how they are combined to a coherent decision support system and briefly discusses the evaluation principles and activities in the DIADEM project.