Is CBR Applicable to the Coordination of Search and Rescue Operations? A Feasibility Study

In response to the occurrence of an air incident, controllers at one of the three Canadian Rescue Coordination Centers (RCC) must make a series of critical decisions on the appropriate procedures to follow. These procedures (called incident prosecution) include hypotheses formulation and information gathering, development of a plan for the search and rescue (SAR) missions and in the end, the generation of reports. We present in this paper the results of a project aimed at evaluating the applicability of CBR to help support incident prosecution in the RCC. We have identified three possible applications of CBR: Online help, real time support for situation assessment, and report generation. We present a brief description of the situation assessment agent system that we are implementing as a result of this study.