Is CBR Applicable to the Coordination of Search and
Rescue Operations? A Feasibility Study

Irne Abi-Zeid1, Qiang Yang2, and Luc Lamontagne1


1Defence Research Establishment Valcartier, 2459 boul. Pie-XI,
Val Belair, Quebec, G31 1X5, Canada
{irene.abi-zeid, luc.lamontagne}@drev.dnd.ca
2Simon Fraser University, School of Computing Science
Burnaby, British Columbia, V5A 156. Canada
qyang@cs.sfu.ca



Abstract. In response to the occurrence of an air incident, controllers at one of
the three Canadian Rescue Coordination Centers (RCC) must make a series of
critical decisions on the appropriate procedures to follow. These procedures
(called incident prosecution) include hypotheses formulation and information
gathering, development of a plan for the search and rescue (SAR) missions and
in the end, the generation of reports. We present in this paper the results of a
project aimed at evaluating the applicability of CBR to help support incident
prosecution in the RCC. We have identified three possible applications of CBR:
Online help, real time support for situation assessment, and report generation.
We present a brief description of the situation assessment agent system that we
are implementing as a result of this study.
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