INTRODUCTION TO SITUATION MANAGEMENT

INTRODUCTION TO SITUATION MANAGEMENT

Gustavo Alberto Moreno López

Medellín, Colombia [email protected]

Wilder Zapata

Infomanagement

Medellín, Colombia

[email protected]

Abstract—This paper cover situation management principles,

concepts, components, approaches, and applications. The investigation of this work is based in what the group SIMA Led by Gabriel Jakobson and the IEEE has been developing, on processes such as those managed by U.S. military forces, international relief agencies, and chemical companies, for the attention of disasters, wars, etc.; Those investigation groups and those companies know the processes as situation management, with the intention of joining it to the level of information protection, business continuity and maintenance of the corporate image. The idea is to create interest in our Latin American companies, researchers and the university itself, to make them part of the research and development of Situation Management.

Keywords - situation management (SM); approaches; applications; disaster; information technology (IT);

I. INTRODUCCION

Many domains such as communications management, modern battlefield operations management, disaster response and crisis management, monitoring of cyber security and physical infrastructure are characterized by an increasing mobility, large number of distributed heterogeneous information sources, and the existence of complicated dynamics, often incomplete and unpredictable. As a result, there is a need for effective methods of recognition of the situation, prediction, reasoning and control operations, that are collectively identifiable as Managing Situations or Situation Management [1], hereinafter referred to as SM

Often, situations can affect a large number of interdependent dynamic objects that change their states in time and space, and engage one another in many complex relationships. From a standpoint of management is important to understand the situations in which these objects participate, to recognize emerging trends and potential threats, and implement the necessary measures.

Management of situations has been used sporadically in different connotations, e.g., in interpersonal relations and personal energy management, processing of the alarms in industrial systems, the assessment of business / financial situations and, more recently, this term has been used in the context of the complex dynamics of operations management and IT platform.

II. GENERAL SCHEME

In Figure 1, we see the picture of SM. The main components are: sensors or detection (S), reasoning (R) and control (C). This type of illustration is not new, has appeared in various forms in literature. In the military domain is known as the OODA, (observation-orientation-decision-action loop) or loop Boyd [2]. In intelligent control, is called the perception-reasoning-action Triad, described by Passino [3].

Fig. 1. General view of the SM

The picture above includes several levels of a Loop of perception/reason / control. Typically, data in the lower levels are "raw", that is to say, as captured by the sensor without processing. Such data could be analyzed immediately and provide control instructions to the effectors, or just move them to an operator for further processing. These raw data may include images, text, electronic signals, etc...

Situation Management is not static. If we imagine the previous figure moving in time from left to right, where sensor data are marked in time, then, we have another set of complex problems, as if the world is sensing at the time t1 and a control instruction is emitted at the time t2, then how can we be sure that the control instruction in time t2 is still applicable?, Could the world have changed since the time t1 which would make inapplicable the instruction?, moreover, how to update a new situation, which data are presented to the system over time?.

A. SM Representation

Figure 2 represents the general domain of SM; we find the theories that form the core of the management situation, the disciplines that contribute, the associated disciplines and the SM applications. The basic theory of SM includes modeling of the Situation, Recognition and reasoning of the situation. [5] In the domain of SM are involved several associated disciplines, like Artificial Intelligence (AI), the fusion of information, the systems of distributed multi-agents, the Semantic Web, networks of sensors, systems of self-organization and human factors.

The disciplines that contribute: situation awareness, situation calculus, situation semantics, situational control.

B. SM Concept

According to Jakobson [5], figure 3, SM is a synergy of process that are oriented towards objectives of a) detection and information gathering, b) the perception and recognition of situations, c) analysis of past situations and the prediction of future situations, and d), reasoning, planning and implementing of actions to ensure that the desired goals of the state is reached within some predefined limits.

Fig. 2. Representing the general domain of SM

Fig. 3. Representing the general concept of SM

For Jakobson, SM is displayed as a framework of concepts, models and available technologies for the recognition, on the reasoning about what affects, and the prediction of the situations that are happening or may happen in the dynamic systems for an operational predefine time.

III. SM COMPONENTS

The definition of Situation Management and the Figure 3 also refer to the essential components of SM. First, depending on the goals of SM, we can understand three aspects of it: research, monitoring, and prediction. The search for the root of the fault in the transmission of a packet in a telecommunications network is an example of an investigation SM; move a water tank unit to the direct area of a hostile fire, is a type of SM control; and a projection of a potential terrorist attack on an element of critical infrastructure, is an example of a SM prediction.

The research aspect of SM is related to a retrospective

analysis of causal situations which determine why a situation occurred.

The control aspect of SM is aimed at changing or

maintaining the current situation.

The predictive aspect of SM aims to project possible future

situations.

Thereon to the control aspects of SM, represents a control loop of the deliberative situation that integrates the four major steps of deliberation: the sensing, the perception, the planning and effecting. The process of deliberation of the situation echoes the architecture of intelligent control systems discussed by Albus [6].

of deliberative situation is generally higher in the management of complex dynamic systems.

There are other dimensions of SM to be mentioned, for example, situation awareness, resolution, acquisition, and learning. The knowledge of the situation is based on the detection and perception measures, aimed at building an understanding of current operational situation, very often in the context based on ergonomics and human factors in an operating room. The resolution of the situation is based on measures of action planning and implementation of actions to close the control loop of the situation. The acquisition and

learning of the situation, being outside the timeline of the

direct process of SM; are the main sources of building the knowledge structures, required for the processes of SM …

IV. SM APLICACIONS

Interest in SM is due to the increasing complexity and scale of real-time applications, including applications such as:

• Military Applications: Images, sensors, radar, ultrasonic bores and intelligent processing of information for targets identification, objectives and monitoring; Management in the asymmetric battlefields and centralized in the network. • Applications of Crisis and Emergency Management:

Mitigation after the disaster and recovery operations during natural and technological disasters, and the ones caused by terrorists.

• Industrial applications: related to real-time monitoring,

failures diagnosis, and prediction of the behavior of complex systems and networks, event management, network management in real time, autonomous services in ubiquitous telecommunications applications.

• Applications in communication networks: real-time

failures, performance and configuration management in telecommunications networks, mobiles, ad hoc and sensors.

• Application security: in the prediction of threats,

vulnerability analysis, intrusion detection associated with the human protection, physical assets, cyber security and territorial or national level.

• Medical: to aid in the intelligent management of

information related to patient health, care facilities, emergencies’ solutions and take appropriate responses. • Applications for training of critical processes, simulation. • Etc.

V. COMPONENTS OF THE MODEL SM

To understand the modeling of situations is necessary to revise the following components: the dynamic, structural and representational of the modeling of situations [5].

The structural component identifies the world, systems and

individual objects, in which is possible to observe what happens to events and the situation evolution, as a transitional

situation. In particular, we can identify the following structural items:

Entities: things that have meaning no matter our area of interest;

Attributes of the entities, associated with the domain and constraints attribute value;

The types of entities: the abstractions of the sets of entities that share common attributes, relationships, operations and performance;

The relationship between the entities, including class, control component, location, and other domain specific relations.

The dynamic component defines the behavior of institutions and entities systems in time. The SM will be in the interest of most situations, events and time.

The component of representation is orthogonal to the two elements mentioned above and its use is the description of them. Essentially, the component of representation is a set of languages, associated interpreters and the environment. We refer here to the following types of languages for modeling situation:

- First, the specification of concepts language, for example the set of theory and finite state machines;

- Structural specification language, for example OWL (Ontology Web Language) [8], and DAML (The DARPA Agent Markup Language) [9];

- Graphical modeling language user-oriented, for example, UML (Unified Modeling Language) [10];

- Specialized languages, for example, the definition language Location SDL [11] and GOLOG [12];

VI. OVERVIEW OF FOCUS FOR SM

Such an "ecosystem" rich and complex of SM is based on multiple paradigms and technologies to promote diverse approaches.

- Calculation of the situation: The first formal

applied to various tasks of planning, including planning for a robot.

- Semantics of the situation: A deviation from the

specification of the state of the world was fully argued by Barwise [15], who observed the situation from the standpoint of understanding the act of talking through "intelligent located agents." Barwise and his colleagues developed a theory of the semantics of the situation based on FOL. The emphasis of the theory of Barwise was not so much to explore under what circumstances, a statement is true, but rather what is the semantics (for example, meaning) of the act of speaking. In his later work Barwise made an important observation showing that a language of understanding, thought and inference is crucial for handling situations such as first class objects that can have properties and stay in relationships.

- Monitoring the situation: Another school of understanding of the situation and their use in control of large engineering systems was proposed by Pospelov [16], [17], in Russia. Known as the theory of control of the situation was based on models of the domain semiotics, developed in linguistics and psychology of language. Semiotics as a science of signs explores the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects of signs. Pospelov considered the situations as statements of relationships between objects that refer to some point in time. The formalism of the situation Pospelov was initially based on the theory of graph-schemes (graph theory) and finite state machines, and later on the formal relational expression, approximate to FOL.

- Understanding of the situation: In the early nineties the

term "situational awareness" was almost indistinguishable from the Industrial Ergonomics and human factors studies of the safety and efficiency of the human operator. Several models of situational awareness were proposed, including models developed by Endsley [18].

Endsley defines situation awareness as the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning and the projection of their states in the near future.

Fig.4. Model of Situation Awareness (Endsley)

Endsley's model shown in Figure 4, can be translate in 3 levels:

•Level 1: Perception of the elements in the environment. •Level 2: Understanding the current situation. •Level 3: Projection of future states.

Another proposal is the JDL fusion model, where the 2+ level is directly associated with an understanding of the operational situation and the forecasting of threats, described by Steinberg [19]. The JDL model defines the Situation Assessment, an estimation and prediction of relations among entities, to include a robust structure and a dynamic interception of relations, communications, prescriptive influences, the

physical context, etc..

Several studies have focused on developing a synergistic model of the understanding of the situation based on the JDL model 2+, and the model of understanding of the situation by Endsley, as expounded Salerm [20] Figure 5.

Fig.5. Situation Assessment Structure

- Approach based on Ontology: An ontology based

approach to understand the situation was developed by M. Kokar et al [21]. The approach uses formal ontology to describe events, objects and relations of dominance between them, the logical rules and processes for recognition and transitions of the situation.

- Multiagent Approach: The multi-agent systems (MAS)

- Correlation of events and case-based reasoning approach: Changes in the entities and relationships can

create situational images of the world very complex situation. Two technologies that have been found useful for handling complex situations are: Event Correlation (EC Event Correlation) and case-based reasoning (CBR, Case - Based Reasoning). CE is a widely recognized approach to network management, for telecommunication networks, to analyze the root causes of failures; and CBR is an effective paradigm for reasoning and decision support applications such as health care, diagnostics, and legal reasoning. Figure 6 integrates CBR and EC [27]. Management) [23].

Event Correlation (EC) is one of the main techniques for

managing high volumes of events messages to recognize patterns and complex events. Is a model for addressing the correlation of events [24]. CE is an effective technology for situational pattern recognition that involves complex analysis of real-time events, as noted by Weissman [25].

The case-based reasoning (CBR) has several benefits as

indicated by Lewis [26], could be very useful for very complex situational pattern recognition. It also has a potential to solve tasks of prediction of the situation and the learning.

- Networks of sensors [4], sensor networks are becoming

an essential component of monitoring and control applications in the military area, safety of environment, protection of environment, health and many other areas. Unlike many other intelligent signs devices, the sensor nodes are capable of collecting data, limited local processing, and transmitting data through transmission (broadcasting) between nodes to one or more stacks of information. The stack, possibly up its own communicational structure; communicates with the management node via satellite network or the Internet.

Fig.6. integrated EC and CBR architecture

VII. SOME COMPANIES

Here is a description of companies working on the Situation Management approach, and others who handle important issues such as risk management and business continuity.

Table1. Companies and products Company Product

Orsus [28] ALERT [29] VIDSYS [30] Ayehu [31] CSM [32] SailPoint [33]

Business Protection Systems [34]

Synergy [35]

Honeywell [36]

McWAINS [37]

Situator OpsCenter VidShield EyeShare 4Command ComplianceIQ 2.0.

Business Protector Gateway

Experion PKS

CONCLUSIONS

This article aims to raise awareness of SM in our environment, led by the IEEE Technical Subcommittee of SIMA; this theme is issue of continuous training. In the IT field, the protection of information is where SM is required for further development, in pursuit of an integrated management of complex systems

and networks.

The most notable problems in the development of SM are: • Identify the techniques of decentralized information

fusion interrelated that is unclear, incomplete, imprecise and ambiguous, which are in situations like natural disasters, terrorist attacks, etc..

• Making inferences about the vision of the world to predict future events that may jeopardize the continuity of business.

• Consider technology options to build architectures for managing complex situations.

• Achieving a synergy between different disciplines that provide final solutions to manage situations.

SM addition to companies that are not in the business of IT, such as military forces, committees of care and disaster prevention, traffic control, security, etc..; can be a support for the functions organization, allowing it to increase their efficiency and effectiveness in its mission.

Although in principle it can be seen as complex, you can also see its importance and the potential that it offers for business: • Ensure business continuity if events happen not only in

IT, but also by external events that jeopardize the company, such as terrorist attacks, large-scale natural disasters among others.

• Allows companies to explore the potential threats and risks, in order to develop procedures to minimize the chance of occurrence but also to minimize the impact to the occurrence of the event or threat, as well as to maintain a range of resources focused on the monitoring platform IT and its environment

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Thanks to Gabriel Jakobson and León Madrid, also to Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, where this research was presented for the specialization in telecommunications degree.

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