Emergency Management in Critical Infrastructures: A Complex-Event-Processing Paradigm

Critical infrastructures (CI) are difficult to handle due to their complexity, size and the number of stakeholders involved. During emergency situations (e.g. fire or terrorist attack), a CI operator in the control room is faced with a flood of information coming from different sensors and legacy monitoring systems. Since in these situations, time is critical and the operators are under a great deal of pressure, a holistic management of all the technical systems and actors involved is needed, reinforced by the Recommendation and Decision Support System (RDSS) that helps emergency managers to take correct and timely decisions. One way to provide an adequate RDSS support to the operator is proposed in this paper which is based on an intelligent, event driven layer that sits on top of the legacy CI monitoring system. Powered by the complex event processing capabilities and facility data model implemented in the form of CI ontology, this layer processes events originating from different sources, conducts the situation and risk assessment, and reacts accordingly, either automatically or via recommendations proposed to emergency personnel. To validate the proposed approach, an event-driven RDSS was deployed on an airport use case (Nikola Tesla airport in Belgrade), as one of the most complex CIs.