| Network
of Excellence |
CARiMan |
The
Internet Portal for Computer Aided Risk Management |
Responsible: NTUA
Assistance:
UNS,
PRO,
TGS,
all
partners
De-mining is the action of removing landmines, booby
traps and UXO from a given area. Mines and booby traps are normally hidden and
most often buried. Mine detection is one of the core components of demining. In
its broadest sense, it includes surveying, mapping and marking the minefield, as
well as the actual detection of mines. There are two types of demining
processes: military and humanitarian. Military demining is the process of clearing mines that block
strategic pathways required in the advance or retreat of soldiers and other
military personnel. For military demining an 80% clearance success is
acceptable. This sort of clearance operation is clearly not suited to civilian
activities. Humanitarian demining is
very different, as it aims to clear land so that civilians can return to their
homes and their everyday routines without the threat of landmines and UXO. This
means that virtually all the mines affecting the places where ordinary people
live must be cleared, and their safety in areas that have been cleared must be
guaranteed. The United Nations has specified a mine clearance standard of 99.6%
for humanitarian demining
The advance of self-organized wireless sensor networks opens up new
possibilities in risk detection and management. The principle goal of a sensor
network is to produce globally meaningful information from local raw data
obtained by individual sensor nodes. Importantly, this goal must be achieved in
the context of prolonging as much as possible the useful lifetime of the network
and ensuring that the network remains highly available and continues to provide
accurate information in the face of security attacks and hardware failure.
Due to their inherent features, namely a possibly much larger number of
sensors and the ability to combine the individual measurements to meaningful
information, previously irresolvable problems can be addressed.