Ambient-aware continuous aid for mountain rescue activities

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive ambient-aware system designed to support mountain rescue operations by processing heterogeneous environmental data and providing proactive, context-aware assistance through a cloud-based middleware platform.

Contribution

It introduces a novel context processing framework integrated with a message streaming broker, repositories, and a SAT solver, tailored for demanding mountain rescue environments.

Findings

Validated with five weather scenarios in mountain environments

Demonstrated effective merging of sensor data into smart decisions

Enabled proactive rescue support through a cloud middleware platform

Abstract

Ambient-awareness in conjunction with pervasive computing is a significant challenge for system designers. It follows the necessity of gathering raw, massive and heterogeneous environmental data \newrrr{which we} obtained, while middleware processes must merge context modelling and reasoning seamlessly. We proposed a system supporting mountain rescuers which is demanding due to the large number of environmental objects interacting, as well as high data variability. We presented complex context processing embedded in the proposed context life cycle and implemented it \erarrr{following a proposed workflow for a demanding}\newrrr{in a difficult} mountain environment. We introduced five weather scenarios which are a basis for contextual and perceptual processing during the validation of our model. The system \erarrr{binds together} \newrrr{merges} a message streaming broker for massive data transport, low and high-level processing algorithms, repositories and a logical SAT solver. It constitutes a Context-Aware-as-a-Service (CAaaS) system, offering advanced support for mountain rescue operations. The provided software model defines middleware components which act on a predicted context and transform in situ sensor data into smart decisions, and which could operate as a platform-based cloud computing model. It is an enabler yielding a synergy effect with different software components orchestration when providing pro-activeness and non-intrusiveness concerning smart decisions.