Goals

The overall goal of BeAware! is to leverage situation and action awareness in large-scale control systems with semantic-based methods, thereby facilitating information integration as well as situation assessment and exchange.

Situation Awareness

Situation awareness comprises the perception of the elements in the environment, the comprehension of the current situation, and the projection of future states. Our intention is to assess critical situations, thereby providing situation awareness by instantiating potentially critical situation types - i. e., sets of interrelated traffic objects - which is achieved by deriving relations among traffic objects. In this respect, we need to address the following challenges:

• Develop ontologies for situation awareness as formal and semantically-rich knowledge representation of situations.
• Incorporate qualitative spatio-temporal relations describing real-world situations with physical objects distributed over time and space.
• Reason about the similarity and evolution of situations to anticipate future critical situations.
• Facilitate efficient and robust situation assessment with computationally tractable reasoning aproaches fulfilling industry-strength robustness requirements.

Action Awareness

BeAware!'s second goal is to assist operators by proposing appropriate actions, indicating possibly unexpected future situations, or highlighting effects actions can incur, entailing the following challenges:

• Develop ontologies for action awareness describing actions integrated with situation awareness ontologies.
• Elaborate on action assessment for proposing viable sets of actions resolving current and preventing future critical situations.
• Project and reason on acton impacts enabling operators to be aware of the effects actions are likely to have.