Event recognition for intelligent resource management

The European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme PRONTO project emphasizes the role of event recognition in intelligent resource management (IRM) and proposes a methodology for fusing data from various sources, analysing it to extract useful information—in the form of events— and delivering the resulting knowledge for decision making. To achieve this, PRONTO uses methods and expertise from the fields of data fusion, information extraction, temporal representation and reasoning, machine learning and knowledge-management systems. Today’s organizations can collect data in various structured and unstructured digital formats, but they do not have the capability to fully use this data to support and improve their resource-management process. Therefore, the analysis and interpretation of the collected data must evidently be automated and transformed into operational knowledge. ‘Events’ are particularly important pieces of knowledge, as they represent the temporal nature of the processes taking place in an organization. PRONTO proposes a synergy of methods to facilitate event recognition from the raw data, which remains underused with current technologies. The extracted knowledge will inform the decision-making process. The need for IRM covers numerous application domains. In emergency-rescue operations, for example, there is a pressing need for real-time decision support facilitating the fastest possible completion of the operation with the minimum possible casualties. An operation manager needs to decide almost instantaneously how to deploy and manage a rescue team to successfully complete an operation. The PRONTO approach to IRM includes a number of steps. First, data is continuously acquired, synchronized and aggregated from various sensor types that are installed in the infrastructure of an organization (e.g., a fire brigade), and from variousmodes of interaction among the relevant actors (e.g., firebrigade personnel). The aggregated data is analysed to extract Figure 1. Event recognition for intelligent resource management (IRM) in emergency-rescue operations.