WEB-BASED EMERGENCY RESPONSE COMMUNITY
Framework and Case Study on Fire Response Community
Alexander Smirnov, Tatiana Levashova, Nikolay Shilov and Alexey Kashevnik
St. Petersburg Institute for Informatics and Automation of the Russian Academy of Sciences,
39, 14th line, St. Petersburg, 199178, Russian Federation
Keywords: Web-based Communities, Smart Space: Web-services, Service-oriented Architecture, Emergency Response.
Abstract: The research addresses the problem of exploitation of smart space’s facilities for the organization of
resources of a smart space into an emergency response community. The members of such a community and
people involved in emergency are enabled to use Web-based interface for their communications and making
decisions, i.e. they organise a Web-based community. The paper proposes a framework that incorporates
concepts of smart space, Web-based communities, and Web-services. The framework replaces real-world
resources of the smart space with their service-based representations. As a result of this replacement, the
emergency response community comprises Web-services representing resources providing emergency
response services. Service-oriented architecture serves to coordinate interactions of the Web-services the
framework deals with. The applicability of the proposed framework is demonstrated by a simulated case
study on organization of a fire response community.
1 INTRODUCTION
Recently, technologies of smart space environments,
Web-services, and Web-based communities have
received much attention due to facilities offered by
them. The smart environments provide efficient
facilities for organization of their resources in a
context-aware way to assist people in their needs
(Lamorte and Venezia, 2009); (Özçelebi et al.,
2010). Web-services offer advantages of seamless
information exchange between the resources of
smart environments (Schroth, 2007) and a potential
for lower integration costs and greater flexibility
(Microsoft Corp., 2003); (Oracle, 2005). Web-based
communities are beneficial in instant information
exchange and online decision making.
The present research addresses the problem of
exploitation of smart space’s facilities for the
organization of resources of a smart space into a
community aiming at emergency response. The
members of this community and people involved in
emergency are enabled to use Web-based interface
for their communications and making decisions. In
this way they constitute a Web-based community.
The paper proposes a framework that
incorporates concepts of smart space, Web-based
communities, and Web-services. This framework
replaces real-world resources of the smart space with
their service-based representations. As a result of
this replacement, the emergency response
community in made up of Web-services representing
resources that provide emergency response services.
Various sensors, actuators, electronic devices with
computational capabilities, etc. as well as humans
and organisations are considered as various kinds of
resources comprising the smart space.
An emergency response community is organised
based on emergency response plan. The problem of
planning emergency response actions is solved by
computational resources of the smart space. Service-
oriented architecture serves to coordinate
interactions of the Web-services the framework
deals with. The applicability of the proposed
framework is demonstrated by a simulated case
study on organization of a fire response community.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows.
Section 2 presents a brief survey of related research.
Section 3 introduces the framework intended for
organisation of emergency response communities in
smart spaces. The service-oriented architecture and
interactions of Web-services constituting the
framework are discussed in Section 4. Section 5
demonstrates the applicability of the framework via
482
Smirnov A., Levashova T., Shilov N. and Kashevnik A..
WEB-BASED EMERGENCY RESPONSE COMMUNITY - Framework and Case Study on Fire Response Community.
DOI: 10.5220/0003909704820491
In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies (WEBIST-2012), pages 482-491
ISBN: 978-989-8565-08-2
Copyright
c
2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
organization of a fire response community. Main
concluding remarks are summarized in Section 6.
2 RELATED RESEARCH
There is no extensive literature on the subject of
organization of Web-based communities in smart
spaces or involvement of members of such
communities in joint actions. An example of
coordination of different users doing collaborative
activities from diverse locations through different
devices is the use of a hypermedia model to describe
and support group activities in intelligent
environments (Arroyo et al., 2008).
The role of social media and online communities
is being thoroughly investigated within the research
area of crisis informatics (Hagar, 2010). Online
forums (Palen et al., 2007), Web portals (Mandel et
al, 2010), Tweeter (Starbird and Palen, 2011);
(Starbird and Palen, 2012), micro-blogging (Vieweg
et al., 2010), social networks (Armour, 2010);
(Krakovsky, 2010), and other forms of social media
are believed to be powerful tools enabling
collaboration of different parties to respond more
effectively to emergencies.
To some extent potentialities of smart spaces in
emergency have been used in an architecture that
intends to improve the collaboration of rescue
operators in emergency management via their
assistance by a Process Management System
(Catarci et al., 2010). This system is installed on the
smart phones and PDAs of the rescue operators. It
manages the execution of emergency-management
processes by orchestrating the human operators with
their software applications and some automatic
services to access the external data sources and
sensors.
The idea close to the integration of Web-services
into an emergency response community has been
studied in research addressing the investigation of
effectiveness of actor-agent communities in context
of incident management (Gouman et al., 2010).
Although the preliminary research results are
inconclusive, they allow ones to suggest that agents,
at least, can efficiently support humans in achieving
a common goal.
The idea beyond the present research of treating
emergency response as the problem of planning
emergency response actions in an efficient manner is
shared by many studies, e.g., (Ng and Chiu, 2006);
(Ling, 2009) and many others.
The approaches above address different aspects
of organisation of communities of actors (including
emergency response communities) sharing a
common goal. They integrate various emerging
technologies to achieve their goals. But no one of
them investigates jointly both the problems of
planning response actions and involvement of the
participants of these actions into Web-based
communities.
3 FRAMEWORK
The proposed framework is intended to coordinate
operations of various resources of a smart space in
context aware way to assist people in attaining their
objectives. The framework distinguishes two kinds
of resources in the smart space: information and
acting. The information resources are various kinds
of sensors and electronic devices that provide data &
information and perform computations. Particularly,
some information resources are responsible for
problem solving. The acting resources are people
and /or organisations that can be involved in the
response actions, i.e., emergency responders.
3.1 Emergency Response Community
As known from e-Government practice,
participation of different stakeholders in e-
Government’s activities can result in broader
(integrated) solutions (Rainford, 2006); (Chourabi
and Mellouli, 2011). So, the framework assumes
partnerships of different stakeholders in emergency
response actions. It integrates emergency services
the smart space provides and voluntary sector as the
partnerships (Figure 1). It is considered that the
smart space provides emergency response services
on first aid, emergency control, and people
evacuation. The services on first aid and emergency
control are services rendered by professional
emergency responders, whereas the evacuation
services are provided by the voluntary sector. This
sector is represented by car drivers – they are the
volunteers ready to evacuate the potential victims.
Access to the emergency response services is
achieved through wire or wireless Internet-
accessible devices. Communications between the
participants of emergency response actions are
supported by Web-based interface. In this way these
participants organize a Web-based community.
The professional emergency responders and the
volunteers make up the emergency response
community. They use Web-based interface to make
decisions on action plans, to exchange information
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during the response actions, and to communicate
with victims.
Emergencyresponse
community
Smartspace’s
emergencyservices
Voluntarysector
Serviceconsumers
Cardrivers
Professionalemergency
responders
Potentialvictims
Injuredpeople
WireorwirelessInternetaccessibledevices
Figure 1: Emergency response community in smart space.
3.2 Generic Scheme of Framework
The idea behind the framework is to represent the
resources of the smart space, emergency responders,
and people in any way involved in the emergency by
sets of Web-services. Each of the listed objects is
characterized by its profile. A profile, besides typical
information characterising an object (object’s name,
address, etc.), holds a set of context sensitive
properties, e.g., the object’s location, its availability,
role, etc. The Web-services provide data stored in
the profiles and implement the resources’
functionalities. As a result of the representation
used, the emergency response community comprises
Web-services representing emergency responders
taking the response actions.
The framework guides the emergency response
as follows (Figure 2). Whenever an emergency event
occurs, resources of the smart space recognize the
type of event and determine other event
characteristics (the location, intensity and severity of
the event, etc.). Based on the type of emergency and
knowledge represented in an application ontology of
the emergency management domain, special
developed services create an abstract context. This
context is an ontology-based model of the
emergency situation of the given type at the abstract
(non-instantiated) level. It represents knowledge
relevant to the emergency situation, i.e., kinds of
services required in the given emergency situation
and other knowledge related to these services.
The abstract context is instantiated by resources
of the smart space. The resources continuously fill
up the abstract context with real-world information
characterising the emergency situation. In this way
an operational context is produced, which is a model
of the emergency situation representing fully-
instantiated real-world objects relevant to it.
Particularly, the operational context contains
Emergency
situation
Services
Web-service
interface
Constraint
satisfaction
problem solving
Smart s
p
ace
Victims and
resources
Decision making
Emergency response
plan
Application ontology Abstract context Operational context
Web-based
community
Profile
Ontology-
b
ased
resource
representation
Emergency response
community
Relationship
Corres
p
ondence
Reference
Information flow
Figure 2: Generic scheme of the framework.
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information about the locations of potential
emergency responders along with some other their
characteristics (their availabilities, capacities, etc.).
The operational context serves as the basis for
producing a plan of response actions. An emergency
response plan is a set of emergency responders with
transportation routes for the mobile responders,
required helping services, and schedules for the
responders’ activities. The problem of plan
producing is solved as a constraint satisfaction
problem, the result of which is a set of feasible
action plans.
From the set of feasible plans an efficient plan is
selected. For this, some efficiency criteria are
applied. For professional emergency responders the
following efficiency criteria are provided for:
minimal time of arriving of professional emergency
responders at the emergency location, minimal time
and cost of transportation of injured people to
hospitals, and minimal number of mobile teams
involved in the response actions. For car drivers
efficiency criteria are minimum evacuation time and
maximum evacuation capacity.
The efficient plan is displayed on the Internet-
accessible devices of emergency responders that are
in this plan for making decisions if they are ready to
act according to the plan or not. The procedure of
making decisions is provided for two reasons.
Firstly, emergency situations are rapidly changing
ones – something may happen between the moment
when a plan is selected and time when the possible
community members receive this plan. Secondly,
resources of the smart space may be disabled in
emergency and because of this operational informa-
tion may be not available; therefore the operational
context may not meet the real state of the situation.
The approved plan is thought to be the guide for
the response actions. The emergency responders
scheduled in this plan organise the emergency
response community.
3.3 Decision Making
Decisions on action plans are made online using
Internet-accessible devices and Web-based interface.
But procedures of making decisions by professional
emergency responders and volunteers are different.
For the professional emergency responders an
emergency response plan is a set of professional
emergency responders (emergency teams, fire
brigades, rescue parties, hospitals, etc.), a set of
services these responders have to provide in the
emergency situation (fire extinguishing,
transportation, first aid, etc.), a set of transportation
routes to go to the emergency location and to
transport injured people to hospitals, and schedules
for the responders’ activities.
The procedure of making decisions by
professional emergency responders is as follows
(Figure 3). If the plan is approved by all the
responders this plan is supposed to be the plan for
actions. Otherwise, either this plan is adjusted (so
that the potential participant who refused to act
according to the plan does not appear in the adjusted
plan) or another set of plans is produced.
The plan adjustment is in a redistribution of the
actions among emergency responders that are
contained in the set of feasible plans. If such a
distribution does not lead to a considerable loss of
time (particularly, the estimated time of the
transportation of the injured people to hospitals does
not exceed “The Golden Hour”) then the adjusted
plan is submitted to the renewed set of emergency
responders for approval. If a distribution is not
possible or leads to loss of response time a new set
of plans is produced, from which a new efficient
plan is selected and submitted to approval.
For the car drivers the emergency response plan
is a plan for evacuation of potential victims from the
dangerous area. Such a plan for a driver is a
ridesharing route and transportation schedule.
Decision making on an evacuation plan is in
making agreement between the driver and the
evacuee to go according to the scheduled ridesharing
route (Figure 4). In case, when there is no agreement
between a driver and an evacuee, another car for
evacuation of this passenger is sought for. At that,
the confirmed routes are not revised.
The emergency responders that are in the
approved plan intended for professional emergency
responders and the drivers participating in the
evacuation organise the emergency response
community.
Figure 3: Decision making by professional emergency
responders.
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Figure 4: Decision making by car drivers and evacuees.
4 SERVICE-ORIENTED
ARCHITECTURE
To coordinate the interactions of Web-services, the
framework deals with, service-oriented architecture
has been designed.
4.1 Architecture Components
The architecture comprises three groups of services
(Figure 5). The first group is made up of core
services responsible for the registration of the Web-
services in the service register and producing the
real-world model of the emergency situation, i.e. the
creation of the abstract and operational contexts.
Services belonging to this group are as follows:
registration service registers the Web-services in
the service register;
application ontology service provides access to
the application ontology;
abstract context service creates, stores,
maintains, and reuses the abstract contexts;
operational context service produces the
operational contexts.
Web-services comprising the second group are
responsible for the organization of an emergency
response community. This group contains:
emergency response service integrates
information provided by the city’s resources;
routing service generates a set of feasible plans
for emergency response actions;
smart logistics service implements functions of
the ridesharing technology;
decision making service selects an efficient plan
from the set of feasible plans and coordinates the
(re)planning procedure.
The third group comprises sets of services
responsible for the representation of the smart
space’s resources, implementation of their functions,
and representation of emergency responders and
people in any way involved in the emergency. This
group includes:
resource services provide data stored in the
Core services
Create model of emergency situation
Smart space’s services
Represent resources, emergency responders, and victims;
fulfill resources’ functions
Emergency response services
Organize emergency response community
Emergency
response
service
Routing
service
Decision
making
service
Smart
logistics
service
Resource services
Registration service
Registers Web-services in the service register
Communication bus
Acting services
Figure 5: Service-oriented architecture.
Application
ontology service
Abstract context
service
Operational
context service
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profiles of information resources and implement
functions of these resources;
acting services provide data stored in the profiles
of acting resources (emergency responders) and
other people involved in emergency.
4.2 Service Interactions
Service interactions in Web-based community are
demonstrated by two scenarios. These scenarios
introduce the service interactions in making
decisions on the plan for actions intended for
professional emergency responders.
Figure 6 shows Web-service interactions when
all the emergency responders agree to participate in
the joint actions according to the plan selected by
decision making service (in the figure the emergency
responders are represented by vehicles that they use
– ambulance, fire truck, and rescue helicopter). It is
seen that decision making service sends
simultaneous messages to all the emergency
responders with the plan for each responder, waits
their replays on plan acceptance (Ready), and sends
them simultaneous messages to take the response
actions (Start).
Figure 7 demonstrates Web-service interactions
in case when all the ambulances selected for the
response actions are not ready to participate in them
and routing service does not manage to adjust the
selected plan. Two ambulances (Ambulance 1 and
Ambulance 2) replay “Not ready” to the messages of
decision making service. This replay is accompanied
with the messages to decision masking service and
operational service with the reasons of their
refusals. Examples of such reasons are the road has
been destroyed, the ambulance has blocked, etc.
Decision making
service
Ambulance Rescue
helicopter
Fire truck
URL_AmbulServ, Route_Ambulance
URL_FTServ, Route_FireTruck
URL_RHServ, Destination
Ready
Ready
Ready
Start
Start
Start
Figure 6: Emergency responders accept emergency
response plan.
Decision making service duplicates the messages
with the reasons for operational service. The
duplication is a guarantee that operational service
will receive information that it was unaware of up to
this moment. As well decision making service sends
the message on excluding the two ambulances from
the list of available emergency responders to routing
service.
Operational service corrects the operational
context according to the information contained in the
reasons. Routing service requests operation service
of the operational context that represents the up-to-
date information of the emergency situation,
generates a new set of plans, and sends it to decision
making service.
5 CASE STUDY: FIRE RESPONSE
COMMUNITY
An applicability of the proposed framework is
demonstrated via the organization of an emergency
response community aimed at response to a fire
event happened in a smart space. The event was
simulated using an internal platform that supports a
GIS-based simulation. The platform is capable to
generate random failures and locations of emergency
responders, and random route availabilities; it allows
ones to input contextual information on types of
emergency events, number of victims, etc.
According to the framework resource services
recognize the fire event, fix the fire location, classify
the fire severity, and registers number of victims to
be transported to hospitals. In the test case it is
simulated that the fire has happened in a building, its
level of severity is low, 9 injured people have to be
transported to hospitals. This information is sent to
emergency response service. This service concludes
that to extinguish the fire 1 fire brigade is required.
Based on the type of emergency (fire) abstract
context service creates an abstract context. This
context represents the following kinds of response
services required in the fire situation: fire service,
emergency service, and transportation service. These
services are provided by the following kinds of
emergency responders: fire brigades, emergency
teams, hospitals, and car drivers. Besides the listed
knowledge, the abstract context represents various
kinds of vehicles that may be used by the emergency
responders, and kinds of roles of the individuals
involved in the fire situation (e.g., leader of a team,
driver, victim, passenger, etc.).
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Decision making
service
Ambulance 1 Fire truck Rescue
helicopter
Ambulance 2 Routing
service
Operational
service
URL_Ambul1Serv, Route_Ambulance1
URL_FTServ, Route_FireTruck
URL_RHServ, Destination
Not ready, Reason 1
Ready
Exclude URL_Ambul1Serv, URL_Ambul2Serv
1: URL11_Route11, URL21_Route12,...; 2: URL21, Route_21, URL_22, Route_22,...
Reason 1
Reason 1
Ready
URL_Ambul2Serv, Route_Ambulance2
Not ready, Reason 2
Reason 2
Reason 2
CurrentSituation_Req
CurrentSituation_Rep
Figure 7: Plan regeneration.
Operational context service instantiates the kinds of
concepts represented in the abstract context and
produces in that way an operational context. For the
instantiation operational context service uses the
information provided by the resource services and
acting services:
the location and severity of the fire event;
the number of victims;
the current locations, availabilities, and
capacities of the mobile emergency responders, i.e.,
fire brigades, emergency teams, and car drivers;
the types of vehicles the mobile emergency
responders use;
the addresses, contact information, availabilities,
and free capacities of the hospitals;
the destinations of cars passing by the fire place
and the cars’ properties (free capacities,
availabilities of baby car seats, etc.);
the current locations of the uninjured people to
be evacuated from the fire area;
the transportation network, the route
availabilities, and the traffic situation.
Operational context service passes the operational
context to routing service. Routing service analyses
types of routes (roads, waterways, etc.) that the
emergency teams and fire brigades can follow
depending on the vehicles they use. Then, routing
service selects feasible fire brigades, emergency
teams, and hospitals that can be involved in the
response operation. They are selected depending on
1) their availabilities; 2) the types of vehicles they
use and 3) the routes available for these types; and
4) the hospitals’ free capacities.
In the simulated area 7 available fire brigades, 8
emergency teams, 5 hospitals having free capacities
for 4, 4, 2, 3, and 3 patients correspondingly are
found; 6 fire trucks and 1 fire helicopter are
allocated to the fire brigades, 7 ambulances and 1
rescue helicopter are allocated to the emergency
teams.
For the found emergency responders routing
service generates a set of feasible plans for actions.
A plan for actions produced for the emergency
teams supposes that one vehicle can house one
injured person.
Routing service passes the operational context
and the set of plans to decision making service. The
latter selects an efficient plan (Figure 8). At that,
minimal time of victim transportations is used as the
efficiency criterion. In Figure 8 the big dot denotes
the fire location; dotted lines depict routes to be used
for transportations of the emergency teams and fire
brigades.
As it is seen from the figure, the set of
emergency responders comprises 1 fire brigade
going by 1 fire helicopter, 7 emergency teams
allocated to 1 rescue helicopter and 6 ambulances,
and 3 hospitals having free capacities for 4, 2, and 3
patients. 1 ambulance (encircled in the figure) and
the rescue helicopter are planned to go from the fire
location to hospitals twice. The estimated time of the
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Figure 8: Plan for actions for fire brigades and emergency teams.
operation of transportations of all the victims to
hospitals is 1 h. 25 min.
Decision making service submits the plan to the
emergency responders that are in it for making
decisions on this plan. The plan is displayed on the
Internet-accessible devices of these responders. The
view of the plan depends on the roles the emergency
responders fulfill in the current emergency situation.
Figure 9 shows part of the plan displayed on the
Tablet PC of the leader of an emergency team.
In the test case all the emergency responders
represented in Figure 8 are supposed to agree on the
plan and therefore have become the members of the
emergency response community.
Concurrently with the planning of the response
actions activities on evacuation of people from the
fire area are undertaken. Persons who need to be
evacuated from the fire area invoke smart logistics
service. This service scans cars passing the person
locations. Based on the information about the person
locations and destinations, and the locations and
destinations of the found cars, routing service
produces a set of feasible ridesharing routes for the
person transportations. Decision making service
selects efficient routes.
The selected efficient routes are displayed on
Internet-accessible devices of the drivers and the
evacuees to confirm their intentions to go according
to the proposed to them ridesharing routes. Besides
the routes, the passengers are informed of the model,
color, and license plate number of the car intended
for their transportation.
As the drivers and the passengers confirm the
evacuation plans, smart logistics service sends ap-
propriate signals to the drivers included in the
agreed plans. Examples of ways routed for a driver
and a passenger and displayed on their smart phones
are given in Figure 10 and Figure 11. For the passen-
ger the walking path to the locations where the
drivers are offered to pick his/ her up is displayed.
The encircled car in the figures shows the location
where the driver is offered to pick up the passenger.
In the simulated example 26 persons are sup-
posed to have to be evacuated from the fire area. The
results obtained for this are as follows: 22 persons
have been driven directly to the destinations by 16
cars whereas for 4 persons no cars have been found.
These 4 persons are informed through their mobile
devices that they can be evacuated by taxis. If they
agree, smart logistics service makes orders for taxi.
The Web-based community organised in the test
case comprises 1) the professional emergency
responders scheduled in the fire response plan
Figure 9: Plan for actions for an emergency team.
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(Figure 8) in the persons of the leaders of the
emergency teams and fire brigades as well as the
administrators of the hospitals; 2) the cars’ drivers
participated in the confirmation of the ridesharing
routes and 3) the evacuees. The emergency teams,
fire brigades, hospitals, and car drivers constitute the
emergency response community.
Figure 10: Ridesharing route: driver’s view.
The Smart-M3 platform (Honkola et al, 2010)
was used in the scenario execution. Tablet PC Nokia
N810 (Maemo4 OS), smart phone N900 (Maemo5
OS), and different
mobile phones served as the user
devices. Personal PCs based on Pentium IV
processors and running under Ubuntu 10.04 and
Windows XP were used for hosting other services.
In the experiments with different datasets the
execution time from the moment the emergency
event was registered to the moment of producing the
operational context took around 0.0007 s. The time
taken to generate the sets of action plans for
different datasets is shown in Table 1. The
approximating equation is quadratic for the total
amount of objects involved in the response actions.
The experimentation showed that the system already
takes a reasonable time for result generation.
Presented results are based on the usage of a
research prototype running on a desktop PC. In a
production environment the system is aimed to be
run on dedicated servers and it is expected to be
responsive enough to handle a large amount of
objects. The future development of Smart-M3 up to
the production level with a higher capacity could
also contribute to the system performance.
Table 1: Execution results.
Number of
emergency
responders
Number of
victims
Total number
of objects
Time of plan
generations, s.
10 10 20 4.85
10 20 30 9.12
20 20 40 17.51
30 30 60 37.93
40 40 80 66.13
50 50 100 101.29
Figure 11: Ridesharing route: passenger’s view.
6 CONCLUSIONS
The problem of integration of services provided by a
smart space with the purpose of organisation of
emergency response communities was investigated.
A framework that serves to integrate concepts of
smart space, Web-services and Web-based commu-
nities has been proposed. The framework supports
seamless information exchange between the re-
sources of the smart space, allows the members of
an emergency response community to make online
decisions on plans for their actions and to communi-
cate during these actions for coordination of their
activities, enables Web-based communications be-
tween the emergency responders and emergency
victims, supports access the emergency services that
the smart space provides using any wire and wireless
Internet-accessible devices.
An original feature of the way the response
actions are planned is in involvement of ridesharing
technology in planning evacuation activities.
Some limitations of the developed framework are
worth mentioning. The framework does not take into
account cases when it is not found enough available
professional emergency responders or when some
resources become disabled at time of the response
actions. As well, the framework does not address the
problem of lack of passing cars for evacuation of
people from the fire area and the problem of
searching for a route with changes if there are not
any cars nearby the fire area going directly to the
person destination. The listed limitations as well as
real-life testing and implementation will be subjects
for future research and activities.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The present research was supported partly by pro-
jects funded by grants 10-07-00368, 11-07-00045,
11-07-00058, 12-07-00298 of the Russian
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Foundation for Basic Research, the project 213 of
the research program “Information, control, and
intelligent technologies & systems” of the Russian
Academy of Sciences (RAS), the project 2.2 of the
Nano- & Information Technologies Branch of RAS,
and the contract 14.740.11.0357 of the Ministry of
Education and Science of Russian Federation.
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