An Open Meteorological Alerting System: Issues and Solutions


Sandy Dance

Ian Mathieson

BMRC

RMIT CSIT

Friday, 28th November 2003
9-30am - 11am

RMIT University Function Room (near Kaleide Theatre)
Building 8, level 2, RMIT,
Swanston Street, Melbourne.

Abstract:

An experimental alerting system is currently under development by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, initially targetted at (but not restricted to) the aviation sector. The system provides alert routing and filtering: for example pressure readings from automated weather stations may conflict with a local terminal aerodrome forecast, resulting in an alert being displayed to forecasters and other interested parties (possibly airlines or individual aircraft).

The multi-agent based design is inherently distributed and readily facilitates scalability and system evolution by simplifying integration of new services and components: for example, adding new types of data sources and/or alerts spanning multiple organisations and system platforms. Another key issue is robustness: the system must be able to adapt to failure of individual components.

Further issues that arise concern more user-focussed alert provision: an aircraft may wish to be notified about alerts (or new alert types) that concern it, i.e. that take place in certain regions.

In this talk, we present the design of the system, discuss how the design addresses some of the issues, and outline our plans for supporting more flexible alert notification. Some early evaluation trials are currently underway.

Biosketches:

Sandy Dance was born in 1948 in Melbourne, Australia. He received his BSc and MSc from Monash University in 1969 and 1972 respectively. After several years in the computer industry, he obtained his PhD in computer vision from the University of Melbourne in 1995. After two years as a post-doc, he moved on to the Bureau of Meteorology Research Centre, where he is working with weather radar and alerting mechanisms. is interests lie in the areas of high level interpretation of images, artificial intelligence and agent networks.

Ian Mathieson is currently a research engineer with the Agent-Oriented Systems group in the RMIT School of Computer Science and Information Technology, prior to which he worked for over 10 years in information technology research at CSIRO. He has MBBS and BMedSc degrees from the University of Melbourne (1978), and an MSc in Computer Science from La Trobe University (1989). Recent research projects include intelligent software agent composition, text retrieval systems and advisory systems, plus systems integration and performance analysis.