CSI - Collaborative Situation Awareness in Distributed Traffic Control Systems

Traffic management, emergency rescue, and military operations are domains that naturally ex-hibit several control systems, operated by different authorities in a distributed way, sharing an environment which is only partially observable, information-intensive and constantly evolving. In such distributed control systems, authorities pursue individual goals and independently collect a vast amount of specific information leading to restrained views on the shared environment. This hampers effective collaboration requiring awareness about simultaneously occurring and mutually affecting situations and control measures for smooth functioning of the overall environment under control. Current insufficient system support for collaborative situation awareness induces huge communication efforts, potential misunderstandings, information overload, and timely pressure on the human system operators. This ultimately endangers the operators’ ability to respond to critical situations with serious real-world consequences by either pro-actively preventing them or achieving their correct and timely resolution ...