Fusion Methodologies in Crisis Management

Book excerpt: The book emphasizes a contemporary view on the role of higher level fusion in designing crisis management systems, and provide the formal foundations, architecture and implementation strategies required for building dynamic current and future situational pictures, challenges of, and the state of the art computational approaches to designing such processes. This book integrates recent advances in decision theory with those in fusion methodology to define an end-to-end framework for decision support in crisis management. The text discusses modern fusion and decision support methods for dealing with heterogeneous and often unreliable, low fidelity, contradictory, and redundant data and information, as well as rare, unknown, unconventional or even unimaginable critical situations. Also the book examines the role of context in situation management, cognitive aspects of decision making and situation management, approaches to domain representation, visualization, as well as the role and exploitation of the social media. The editors include examples and case studies from the field of disaster management.