The Windmill Method
for Communication Support
in Professional Task Settings
with Incidents
Duco N. Ferro
joint work with Catholijn M. Jonker and Alfons H. Salden

Motivation
• How to develop communication support for Professional
Task Settings with Incidents to resolve incidents? 2

Concepts in PTSI
• Logistic Network
• Communication Network
• Information Network
3

Logistic Network :
Mobile Human Surveillance Security example
544211
643221
355233
701344
732005
route:240
Security Guard 541111 332009
HQ
route:245
324222
route:275
761000
254100
433555
500223
Dispatch Center
4

Incident Resolution
Response
Incident Incident Response Incident Return to
Dispatched Arrives on
Occurs Notified Identified Cleared Duty
Scene
Detection Decision Communication Travel Clearance Recover
Dispatch
Response
Resolve
Total Incident Duration
• Incident : An occurence or event, natural or human-caused,
that requires an emergency response to protect life or property
5

Communication Network
Mobile professionals Team leaders
Dispatch operators
• Knowledge on incident handling is distributed mostly over the
6
personnel and is exclusively available through communication

Information Network
• Legacy systems
• Logging systems
• Information systems
• Databases
• Integrate the networks:
introducing a multi-agent network
7

Problems & Opportunities
Goal : Recommend some one that is likely to resolve an
incident giving maximum performance (e.g., quickly)
Problems :
– situational awareness at dispatch centers is limited
– communication bottlenecks cause delay
– the main body of personnel is mobile
– personnel changes relatively quickly, so experience is lost
– the occurrence of these incidents over time and space is sparse
Opportunities:
• use past & similar incident solutions
• feedback mechanisms
8

The Windmill Method
1) Problem Analysis
2) Agent Network Design
3) Organizing Network Interfaces
4) Evaluation of Support
9

Problem Analysis Fantail
1) What are the properties of each network?
2) What are the professionals &
stakeholders? Wind
3) What tasks are there, and which are
suitable for support?
4) What are the requirements for support?
5) Purpose
What is the performance criteria for these
tasks?
6) What data/information sources are
available?
Tools :
• Field study
• Interviews
• Scenario’s 10

Multi-Agent Network Design
1) What are the agents ?
2) What are there tasks ?
3) How do they interact with other agents ?
4) What aspects of the environment do the
agent take into account? Blades
5) How do the agent determine Mechanics
recommendations?
Structure
Tools :
• Multi-Agent Design
• Algorithms
11

Organizing Network Interfaces
1) How do the agents interact and co-evolve with logistic network,
communication network and information network ?
2) Which feedback, aggregation, propagation and self-organization
are desired?
12

Evaluation
1) Does the support system
improve communication and
incident management?
2) Does it improve for all parties?
Milling
Tools :
• Questionnaires
• Statistical analysis of logs
13

Case Study remainder
The blades (aspects) :
• Experience of the actors
• Subjective feedback of the actors
• Incident type
• Temporal relevance (recency)
• Spatial relevance (proximity)
Instance- Based Learning
< 30 min !
14

Simulation Results
Without support
With support
Performance : response time in minutes using
Kendall’s tau correlation as relevance metric 15

Conclusions
• The Windmill a powerful metaphor that allows a
structured approach to PTSI communication
support
• Resulting filtering approach by relevance
weighting has an effect for tackling dynamic
environments & sparse data
• Can be applied to more domains & easy to
extend
16

Questions ?
duco@almende.org
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