METIS: Dependable Cooperative Systems for Public Safety

Much, if not most, information needed to assess a crisis situation originates these days from cooperative sources such as the Internet and social networks. Public safety authorities face the challenge to compile this information of uncertain origin and quality in their situation understanding and response planning. Time matters: the integration of uncertain information needs to be done in a fast, goal-driven and ad-hoc manner.Such situation understanding requires system support in the form of a dependable and cooperative system-of-systems: able to adapt semi-automatically to new situations and to improve the value of the information using built-in reasoning and awareness techniques. The METIS project researches such system support for public safety as a collaborative project of Dutch universities, knowledge institutes, and industry, using the maritime domain as case study. The METIS goal stretches the scope of system engineering, as the main requirements of ad-hoc adaptation and dependability contradict each other.In this paper, we describe the METIS information architecture and highlight our four major research lines: (i) System architectures beneficial for dependability and adaptability; (ii) Application and system dependability ensured by embedded awareness; (iii) Ad-hoc system adaptability and goal-driven system reconfiguration; (iv) Integration and semantic alignment of various (natural language) information sources.