Decision support system for the crisis management in an instance of uncertainty of information and data

A frequent and quite normal situation in the crisis management is an instance of uncertainty and a lack of amount, structure, time adequacy and quality of information and data, thus the decisions makers and reacting managers have to deal with this problem. In the technologic project TP-06/0007-01 was implemented Decision Support System (DSS) for the area reduction for mine action management on a strategic level through the use of data fusion methodological approach and the upgrade of the results from SMART project . Although the DSS was applied on the problems of the humanitarian mine, it has wider potential and could be applied in other crisis situations. Data fusion methodological approach is based on (1) the interpreted and fused multi-sensor imagery collected by aerial reconnaissance and surveillance, (2) enhanced and extracted indicators of mine presence and indicators of mine absence, (3) the formalized expert knowledge, (4) on the combined contextual data, (5) the spatial data provided by geographic information system (GIS) and (6) on the data contained in other information systems (e.g. Mine Information System (MIS) of the mine action centre (MAC)). The generic solutions from SMART have been integrated with data fusion methodological approach and implemented in the form of the DSS. SMART is intended to provide some of this additional information that would help in two ways: it can reinforce the suspicion of some places and reduce the suspected area on others. Output of the DSS at the final stage consist of three maps: (1) the map of mine danger measure, (2) confidence map of indicators of mine presence and indicators of mine absence, (3) the map of spatial stability of results. The methodological combination of three of them enables the validation or dismissal of areas proposed for reduction, thus they are suitable for practical use in mine action management of the humanitarian demining.