DARE: Distributed Autonomous and Resilient Emergency Management System

Critical infrastructures serve as the pillars for the nation's economy, security and health programmes and include assets, systems, and networks spanning a significant breadth of the its geographical area. In the event of a potential destruction to these infrastructures by either man-made or natural disasters, it is of paramount importance to implement an appropriate emergency management system (EMS) capable of handling or preventing such catastrophes. A key feature in an EMS is an effective and efficient critical communication platform that provides situational awareness and coordination. However, the current communication platforms for EMS are susceptible to being incapacitated or destroyed by the disaster or the network congestion that arise as a result of such disaster. Furthermore, current platforms are human-in-the-loop based, requiring substantial human resources and cost for surveillance, preparation and actuation in case of emergencies.
In the light of this, the aim of the project is to conduct advanced research into a new Distributed Autonomous and Resilient EMS; referred here as DARE. The DARE architecture will support all phases of the EMS and will be founded upon three main communication platforms that are Wireless Sensor networks (WSNs), Ad-hoc networks and Future cellular networks (5G and beyond).
As part of this research project, we will incorporate an autonomous i.e. self-governed, self-healing disaster/network failure detection mechanism to reduce the cost of control signalling traffic associated with the traditional disaster/network failure detection mechanisms which require frequent network probes and network alarms.
Investigators from the University of Surrey, University of Glasgow, Kingston University and the University of Malaya, Malaysia will work with leading communications and critical solutions provider like Ubitech Ltd, BT, Telefonica and Huawei to ensure that maximum impact arises from this program.

DARE project will decrease the cost of emergency management while increasing the level of coordination and effectiveness of resources.

The direct beneficiaries of the proposed research are:
- Countries on the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) list: Malaysia, which is one of the countries on the OECD DAC list will be the primary beneficiary of the findings of this project. The coverage difficulty experienced as an aftermath of the Malaysia's 2014-15 flooding called for an improvement in Malaysia's communications infrastructures in order to ensure access to the communications network during crisis. DARE project develops solutions in this direction.
- World Disaster Relief Organisations: Organisations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and United Nations (UN) can use these self-configurable and readily deployable emergency response functionalities of the DARE to carry out relief operations in hostile environments where communication infrastructures are not operational.
- First Responder Organisations: These organisations (such as Police, Fire Brigade and Paramedics) will be able to communicate on a common platform and across borders using the DARE platforms. Furthermore, they will have situational awareness using wireless sensor networks (WSNs), something which does not exist currently in their systems.
- Network Operator companies: The 2014-15 Malaysia flooding and London bombing aftermaths teach us that cellular and emergency communications networks can collapse due to the overwhelming connection requests. Thus it will be important to consult and work alongside such companies including emergency communications players in the area such as Airwave Solutions Ltd. Furthermore, these operators will be interested in finding out the fusion of Future Networks with emergency networks and the way forward in realising the paradigm.
- Companies that provide services and network equipment in disaster scenarios: sensor manufacturers, network elements manufacturers and video analytics developers. DARE will provide a novel context-aware networking approach based on an overlay structure for ubiquitous networking systems, which will be commercialised.
- Companies that provide emergency communication systems: The DARE will innovatively enable cross-platform information transfer and data fusion between machine to machine networks/ WSNs and ad-hoc/ubiquitous networks. These companies can capitalise on the project's effort to provide novel effective and efficient autonomous Emergency Management System (EMS).
- Ministry of Defence (MoD): The novel DARE software architecture is optimisable and re-usable for military scenarios. Thus collaborating companies that deal with software architectures related to military communications can approach the MoD with a unique distributed intelligent tactical communication system.
- Standardisation bodies: Bodies such as International Telecommunication Union (ITU), European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) are working on emergency communication systems. This new EMS paradigm will encourage standardisation activities in the area of WSN/M2M, ad-hoc/ubiquitous networks and future networks for a converged Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) protocol stack.
- Junior Researchers working on the project: Post-doctoral research associates working on the project will learn new technical skills, such as machine learning, anomaly detection and algorithm development, which are relevant to the project. They will also be working with external partners and so gain industrial awareness and skills.
- The general public: DARE will provide a higher level of civilian protection and awareness.